Netherlands-based Hadrian has raised USD 40 million in a round co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin.
The funding round for the agentic AI offensive security company also includes participation from existing investors HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital, and Oetker Ventures. The investment brings Hadrian's total funding to approximately USD 65 million. The company plans to use the capital to expand across EMEA and the US, as well as to increase investment in its engineering and research teams.
AI-driven attacks and the problem of alert noise
The round comes as AI changes the way cyberattacks are carried out. Over recent weeks, reports have described AI agents breaking out of test environments and accessing company systems without human direction. In the most recent case, Anthropic disclosed that criminal and state-linked groups had used its models to automate entire attack chains and develop zero-day exploits.
Meanwhile, defensive practices have been slower to adapt. According to data cited by Hadrian, 87% of organisations still rely on manual penetration tests, and more than 70% of security teams find it difficult to determine which exposures can actually be exploited. The company also points to figures showing that only 0.47% of vulnerability scanner findings proved genuinely exploitable, meaning that 99.5% of the alerts security teams focus on require no action.
How the platform works
Hadrian's platform is designed to assess security from an attacker's perspective. It maps an organisation's digital footprint, identifies risks, and prioritises remediation so that security teams can reduce their external attack surface. Under this model, people set objectives and take the key decisions, while AI agents carry out the work in between, providing the coverage, repetition, and speed that human teams cannot maintain continuously.
The platform combines two products: Atlas and Nova. Atlas maps an organisation's external attack surface on an ongoing basis and uses purpose-built AI agents to validate which exposures are exploitable. Nova provides on-demand agentic penetration testing, which the company says performs at and beyond the level of a human pentester. Because the two products share context, teams can move from continuous monitoring to deeper testing without restarting the process. Hadrian states that it is the only vendor combining continuous exposure management and agentic penetration testing in a single platform. The company reports ten times greater visibility into critical exposures, 80% faster time to resolution, and a fivefold return on investment compared with manual penetration testing.
Growth base
Hadrian works with organisations in the US and Europe, including McKesson, NBCUniversal, Francisco Partners, TotalEnergies, Amadeus, Leroy Merlin, and Damen Shipyards.
Commenting on the round, Rogier Fischer, CEO of Hadrian, said that although AI is reshaping the threat landscape, many organisations are automating the wrong parts of the security process. He added that the platform was built to emulate attackers' paths so that customers can identify their main risks and allocate security resources accordingly.
Damien Henault, Managing Director and Partner at Forgepoint Capital International, noted that security teams face too many vulnerabilities and too much noise, and need tools that allow them to assess threats the way AI-equipped attackers would. Saumitra Dubey, Partner at SmartFin, pointed to Hadrian's growing enterprise contract values, global customer base, and enterprise retention rates, adding that the investor supports the company's ambition to build a nine-figure revenue business.
