Hadrian Raises $40M to Tackle the AI Hacking Cyber Security Crisis

Hadrian, the agentic AI offensive security platform based in Amsterdam, 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. 

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 organisations 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.

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 organisation’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. 

Saumitra Dubey, Partner at SmartFin: “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. 

Source: Hadrian