Hadrian Raises $40 Million to Expand AI-Powered Offensive Security

Hadrian has raised $40 million in a funding round to accelerate the development of its agentic AI offensive security platform and expand its presence across the U.S. and EMEA. The funding will support engineering, research, and international growth as organizations face increasingly sophisticated AI-driven threats. Hadrian is positioning its AI offensive security platform to help security teams continuously identify, validate, and remediate exploitable risks before attackers can take advantage of them.

Hadrian Secures $40 Million in New Funding

The Series B round was co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin, with participation from existing investors HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital, and Oetker Ventures.

The latest investment brings Hadrian's total funding to $65 million. The company plans to use the capital to expand across EMEA and the United States while increasing investment in its engineering and research teams.

The funding arrives as security teams face a growing gap between the speed of modern attacks and the ability of traditional security processes to identify and validate real threats.

Hadrian says its customers have achieved 10 times greater visibility into critical exposures, 80% faster time to resolution, and a five-times return on investment compared with manual penetration testing.

AI Is Changing the Offensive Security Landscape

The rise of AI agents has changed how attackers can discover vulnerabilities, develop attack paths, and automate portions of cyberattacks.

Hadrian argues that defenders need to adopt similar levels of speed and automation. Traditional penetration testing and vulnerability scanning can provide valuable information, but they may not continuously determine which vulnerabilities an attacker could actually exploit.

The company aims to address this challenge by using AI agents to continuously examine an organization's attack surface and validate security exposures.

According to Hadrian, 87% of organizations still conduct penetration testing manually, while only 0.47% of vulnerability scanner findings prove genuinely exploitable. This creates a significant amount of security noise for teams that must prioritize remediation.

Atlas Maps External Attack Surfaces

Hadrian's platform combines continuous exposure management with agentic penetration testing.

Atlas continuously maps an organization's external attack surface and uses specialized AI agents to investigate potential weaknesses. The system is designed to determine which exposures could provide meaningful opportunities for attackers.

This approach helps security teams move beyond simply collecting vulnerability findings. Instead, they can focus their attention on weaknesses that present a realistic path to compromise.

Hadrian says its platform gives organizations a view of their security environment from an attacker's perspective, helping teams prioritize the risks that require the most urgent attention.

Nova Performs AI-Powered Penetration Testing

The second major component, Nova, provides agentic penetration testing on demand.

Nova can conduct penetration tests designed to simulate how attackers could move through an organization's environment. The platform uses AI to perform testing at a scale and frequency that traditional human-led penetration testing teams cannot easily sustain.

Hadrian says its platform runs more than 100 million attack simulations each day. These simulations help the system continuously investigate attack paths and identify risks that may otherwise remain hidden.

By combining Atlas and Nova, Hadrian aims to create a continuous security process that moves from exposure discovery to validation and remediation.

AI Agents Help Identify Real Security Risks

A major challenge for security teams is determining whether a reported vulnerability represents a realistic attack opportunity.

Hadrian's approach focuses on validating exposures rather than treating every scanner result as equally important.

The platform uses AI agents to emulate attacker behavior and determine how vulnerabilities can be exploited within a particular environment. This helps organizations separate theoretical weaknesses from risks that could realistically lead to compromise.

Hadrian says this approach can help security teams reduce the time spent investigating irrelevant alerts and concentrate resources on genuine attack paths.

Dual-Agent Controls Add Safeguards

Using autonomous AI to conduct offensive security testing introduces its own risks. Hadrian therefore uses a secondary AI system to monitor the actions of its primary hacking agent.

This dual-agent approach provides an additional layer of control over autonomous testing activity. The monitoring system reviews actions and helps ensure that the offensive agent operates within defined boundaries.

The company says humans remain responsible for setting the mission and making important security decisions, while AI handles the repetitive testing and investigation required to maintain continuous coverage.

This balance is designed to give security teams the speed of autonomous AI without removing human oversight from the process.

Hadrian Plans to Expand Into Internal Networks

The company's current platform primarily focuses on external attack surfaces. Hadrian plans to expand its capabilities into internal network security as part of its next phase of development.

This expansion would allow the platform to investigate what happens after an attacker gains initial access.

Instead of identifying only the first compromised system, Hadrian wants to map how an attacker could move through an internal environment toward sensitive assets such as customer databases and other critical systems.

This capability could provide organizations with a more complete view of attack paths, from initial entry through potential lateral movement and access to high-value resources.

Hadrian Targets AI-Specific Security Risks

Hadrian also plans to address emerging threats involving AI agents and autonomous systems.

The company has identified a growing category of risks that does not always involve traditional software vulnerabilities. Attackers can potentially manipulate AI systems through deceptive instructions, unexpected inputs, or carefully constructed interactions.

These risks require security testing that can dynamically interact with AI systems rather than simply scanning source code or checking configuration settings.

Hadrian plans to invest in technology that can test these qualitative threats and help organizations understand how AI-powered applications could behave under adversarial conditions.

Automated Remediation Is the Next Step

Hadrian's longer-term strategy extends beyond finding and validating vulnerabilities.

The company plans to develop AI agents that can proactively implement certain security fixes. Potential applications include changing firewall rules or correcting security misconfigurations that allow an attack path to remain open.

This would move the platform from identifying security problems toward helping organizations close them automatically.

Hadrian expects automated remediation to become an important area of investment following the latest funding round. The company also recognizes that these agents will require extensive training and safeguards before organizations can deploy them reliably at scale.

Global Expansion Follows Growing Enterprise Demand

Hadrian was founded by Rogier Fischer, Olivier Beg, and Maurice Clin and has expanded its operations across Amsterdam, London, and New York.

The company works with enterprise organizations including McKesson, NBCUniversal, Francisco Partners, TotalEnergies, Amadeus, Leroy Merlin, and Damen Shipyards.

The new funding will allow Hadrian to increase its international presence while continuing to develop its offensive security technology.

Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin said the company's customer growth and technology position it to address increasing demand for automated offensive cybersecurity.

Moving From Vulnerability Detection to Continuous Validation

Hadrian's latest funding reflects a broader shift in cybersecurity toward continuous security validation.

Rather than relying solely on periodic penetration tests or large volumes of vulnerability alerts, organizations increasingly need to understand which weaknesses attackers can actually exploit.

Hadrian's platform combines continuous exposure mapping, AI-powered penetration testing, attack-path analysis, and remediation capabilities to address that requirement.

The company believes AI can help security teams increase testing frequency while reducing the manual effort required to investigate vulnerabilities.

Hadrian Advances Its Offensive Security Strategy

The $40 million investment gives Hadrian additional resources to expand its AI-powered offensive security platform and enter new areas of cybersecurity.

The company's strategy combines Atlas for continuous external exposure mapping with Nova for agentic penetration testing, while future development will focus on internal attack paths, AI-specific threats, and automated remediation.

As attackers increasingly use AI to accelerate reconnaissance and exploitation, Hadrian is betting that defenders will also need autonomous technologies to keep pace.

The company is therefore moving toward an offensive security model that continuously tests, validates, and helps remediate real-world attack paths before adversaries can exploit them.

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