Hadrian Raises $40M to Tackle the AI Hacking Cyber Security Crisis
Hadrian, the agentic AI offensive security platform, today announced a $40 million funding round co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin, with participation from existing investors HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures. The backing brings total funding to $65M and will fund expansion across EMEA and the U.S. and deepen investment in Hadrian’s engineering and research teams.
Also Read: Atos secures £350 million application management contract with Metropolitan Police Service
The raise comes as AI fundamentally upends the offensive security landscape. News of AI agents escaping test environments and hacking company systems with no human direction have dominated headlines in recent weeks. In the most recent, Anthropic disclosed that criminals and state-linked groups had used its models to automate whole attack chains and write zero-day exploits. Attackers now move at machine speed, but many security teams are years behind, with data showing that 87% of organizations still run manual pentests.
They are also being distracted by the volume of irrelevant signals: more than 70% of security teams struggle to determine which exposures are exploitable, unsurprising when only 0.47% of vulnerability scanner findings proved genuinely exploitable. That means 99.5% of the alerts teams focus on need no action.
As such, there is a real market need for a solution that can identify the genuine threats and cut through the noise. Hadrian allows businesses to see security through a hacker’s eyes, mapping the digital footprint, discover risks, and prioritise remediation for security teams to harden their external attack surfaces. Humans set the mission and make the decisions that matter, while AI does the work in between, providing the coverage, repetition and speed that no team can sustain around the clock.
Also Read: IT Tech Pulse Exclusive Interview with Chris Ortbals, Chief Product Officer, Tangoe
To achieve this, Hadrian combines continuous exposure management and agentic penetration testing in one platform, the only vendor to offer this approach. Atlas continuously maps an organization’s external attack surface and uses purpose-built AI agents to validate which exposures are actually exploitable. Nova provides agentic pentesting on demand on a human-pentest level and beyond. Together, they deliver results that include:
- 10x greater visibility into critical exposures
- 80% faster time to resolution
- 5x ROI compared to manual pentesting
Because the two share context, security teams can move from continuous visibility to deeper testing without starting from scratch.
Hadrian was founded by Rogier Fischer, Olivier Beg and Maurice Clin. Fischer and Beg are former teenage ethical hackers turned serial entrepreneurs, with Fischer launching one of Europe’s first crypto-exchanges before working with Beg on Hadrian. They built the company to create offensive security that could operate continuously and at scale, giving teams more reach without taking judgment out of their hands.
Rogier Fischer, CEO of Hadrian, said: “Everyone can see that AI is changing the threat landscape. It might also hold the answer, but most people are focused on automating the wrong bits. We have been working with LLMs since before they went mainstream, and we know that AI can work much faster than any human offensive security team. So we built a platform that emulates hackers’ attack paths, helping our customers to understand their key risks and prioritise their security resources appropriately.”
Damien Henault, Managing Director and Partner at Forgepoint Capital International, said: “There are too many vulnerabilities and noise out there for teams to manage, so they need tools that can help them see clearly and think like AI-armed hackers. Hadrian’s AI native always-on solution delivers both depth and breadth and helps its customers to focus on genuine issues and risks, and the companies using its platform are testament to both its innovative approach and the strength of its team, both aspects which make them a natural choice for us to back.”
Saumitra Dubey, Partner at SmartFin, said: “Rogier and his team have built an agentic hacking platform that truly stands apart in the offensive cybersecurity space. Hadrian’s growing enterprise contract values, global customer base and exceptional enterprise retention rates demonstrate both the strength of its product and the team’s ability to execute and win against the largest cybersecurity incumbents. This funding comes at a pivotal moment, accelerating Hadrian’s next phase of growth as we support its ambition to become a global cybersecurity leader and build a nine-figure revenue business.”
Hadrian works with companies in the US and Europe, including Fortune 500 leaders and industry disruptors such as McKesson, NBC Universal, Francisco Partners, Total Energies, Amadeus, Leroy Merlin, and Damen Shipyard.
Alessio Setaro, Digital Solutions Leader at Leroy Merlin said: “Leroy Merlin runs large omnichannel operations, and every new solution and digital integration adds to what we have to protect. Hadrian helps us to find exposed assets when they run out our control and test them the way an attacker would. That gave our team clear priorities. We’re glad to see Hadrian raise this round and keep building.”
Hans Quivooij, CISO at Damen Shipyards said: “Hadrian has changed the way we look at our external attack surface. Instead of relying on periodic assessments and a known inventory, we now have continuous visibility into what an attacker can actually see and potentially exploit. For a global organisation like Damen, that ability to discover unknown exposures and focus our teams on the risks that really matter is where Hadrian delivers its value.”
Write to us [wasim.a@demandmediaagency.com] to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programmes.
