Hadrian Agentic Security Lands $40M to Counter AI Hackers

Amsterdam-based Hadrian has raised $40 million to expand its Hadrian Agentic Security platform, betting that the only way to defend against AI-powered attackers is to fight back with AI agents of its own.

Hadrian announced the round this week, with the financing co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin. According to the company's announcement carried by Business Wire, the new Hadrian Agentic Security backing brings total funding to $65 million and will fund expansion across the United States and EMEA alongside deeper investment in engineering and research teams.

The Hadrian Agentic Security approach flips the traditional penetration test on its head. Rather than hiring consultants to probe a company's defenses once or twice a year, the company's software deploys AI agents that continuously map external attack surfaces and validate which exposures an attacker could actually exploit.

Existing investors HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures joined the round, reported SecurityWeek. The Amsterdam startup behind Hadrian Agentic Security was founded in 2021 by former ethical hackers Rogier Fischer and Olivier Beg together with entrepreneur Maurice Clin.

AI Attackers Are Moving at Machine Speed

The timing of the Hadrian Agentic Security raise reflects a shift in the threat landscape that defenders are struggling to keep up with. According to the company's announcement, AI models are increasingly automating the hacking process, from reconnaissance and vulnerability discovery to exploit development.

Anthropic recently disclosed cases involving criminals and state-linked groups using AI models across portions of attack chains, reported Tech Startups. Those cases included work related to zero-day vulnerabilities, signaling that the era of fully automated attack pipelines is approaching.

Yet defensive practices have barely moved. Hadrian's own 2026 Offensive Security Benchmark Report found that 87 percent of organizations still rely on manual penetration testing. The same research found that just 0.47 percent of vulnerability scanner findings were genuinely exploitable, meaning security teams drown in alerts while genuine attack paths go unnoticed.

Hadrian Agentic Security engineers argue that this mismatch creates the real market opening. More than 70 percent of security teams struggle to determine which exposures are actually exploitable, according to the company's research, so software that can answer that question continuously carries obvious appeal.

How Atlas and Nova Emulate Hackers

The Hadrian Agentic Security platform combines continuous exposure management with agentic penetration testing in two linked products. Atlas continuously maps an organization's external attack surface and uses purpose-built AI agents to determine which exposures are exploitable. Nova then provides on-demand agentic penetration testing for deeper probes.

Because the two products share context, reported Tech.eu, security teams can move from continuous monitoring to deeper testing without restarting the process from scratch. 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 human team can sustain around the clock.

EU-Startups reported that the company also operates a proprietary predictive discovery agent that autonomously verifies whether remediation efforts actually worked. The goal is an end-to-end loop: discover exposures, validate which ones matter, guide remediation, and confirm the fix.

The company attributes strong results to this loop. According to Tech.eu's coverage, Hadrian claims its technology delivers ten times greater visibility into critical exposures, reduces time to resolution by 80 percent, and returns five times the investment of manual penetration testing. Those performance metrics come from the company itself rather than independent testing, so prospective buyers will likely want to see customer-side evidence.

Enterprise Customers Are Signing On

Hadrian already lists enterprise customers including McKesson, NBCUniversal, TotalEnergies, Amadeus, Leroy Merlin, Francisco Partners and Damen Shipyards. According to Tech Startups, the company says customers have seen faster remediation and higher visibility into exploitable risks.

The chief executive, Rogier Fischer, has framed the product as an answer to what he describes as an industry focused on automating the wrong parts of security. In comments accompanying the raise, he said most people are focused on automating the wrong bits, and that his team built a platform that emulates hacker attack paths so customers can understand their key risks and prioritize security resources appropriately.

The investor interest in Hadrian Agentic Security fits a broader pattern in the agent economy: capital is flowing toward platforms that let AI agents operate continuously, autonomously, and at machine speed. Defense is only the latest category to feel that shift.

Will Agentic Defense Stand Alone?

The strategic question hovering over the Hadrian Agentic Security round is whether AI offensive-security platforms become standalone categories or eventually get absorbed as features inside major cybersecurity suites. For now, investors are betting on the standalone thesis, with $40 million representing one of the larger European agentic-security rounds this year.

The category is also attracting competition from adjacent angles. Identity and governance platforms are racing to control what fleets of AI agents can access, as seen in SailPoint's recent launch of autonomous agent governance, while industry groups work toward standards for trustworthy deployment like the trustworthy AI certification program from TM Forum and Accenture.

The Hadrian Agentic Security pitch is that neither governance nor certification matters much if the attack surface itself is invisible. Continuous, agent-driven discovery fills that gap, and $65 million in total funding gives the company room to prove it across two continents.

For coverage of the funding announcement from the business press, see Hadrian's announcement on Business Wire and SecurityWeek's analysis of the round. European startup coverage is available via Tech.eu's report.