Dutch offensive security startup Hadrian Security B.V. today announced that it has raised $40 million in new funding to expand its business internationally.

Hadrian’s software points artificial intelligence agents at a company’s internet-facing systems to work out which weaknesses an attacker could actually exploit. No other vendor offers continuous exposure management and agentic penetration testing together on one platform, the company claims.

The platform is split into two products, Atlas and Nova. Atlas maps an organization’s external attack surface around the clock, and agents built for the job check whether each exposure it turns up can really be used in an attack. Nova handles penetration testing on demand. Because the two share context, a team that spots something suspect in Atlas can send Nova in to dig deeper without starting from scratch.

The funding comes less than a month after Anthropic PBC disclosed that criminal and state-linked groups had used its Claude models to automate attack chains and hunt for zero-day vulnerabilities. Hadrian argues that defenders have not caught up. By its count, 87% of organizations still rely on manual penetration tests, and just 0.47% of the findings vulnerability scanners produce turn out to be exploitable.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Rogier Fischer said AI, which is reshaping the threat landscape, may also hold the answer. In his view, “most people are focused on automating the wrong bits.” Hadrian has worked with large language models since before they went mainstream, according to Fischer. He said the platform was built to emulate the attack paths hackers take so that customers can see their biggest risks and decide where to put their security resources.

McKesson Corp., NBCUniversal Media LLC and TotalEnergies SE are among the company’s customers in the U.S. and Europe. Hans Quivooij, chief information security officer at Dutch shipbuilder Damen Shipyards Group N.V., said Damen used to rely on periodic assessments and a known asset inventory. Hadrian now gives the shipbuilder “continuous visibility into what an attacker can actually see and potentially exploit,” he said. Across its customer base, the company says, visibility into critical exposures is up tenfold and issues get resolved 80% faster.

The new money will go toward growth across Europe, the Middle East and Africa and in the U.S. Hadrian’s engineering and research teams are also set to get bigger.

Fischer started Hadrian in 2021 with Olivier Beg and Maurice Clin. He and Beg were ethical hackers in their teens, and Fischer later launched one of Europe’s first cryptocurrency exchanges before working with Beg on Hadrian.

Forgepoint Capital International and Smartfin co-led the round. HV Capital, which led Hadrian’s 2022 seed round, returned alongside Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures.

Smartfin partner Saumitra Dubey said the firm is backing the company’s plan to “build a nine-figure revenue business.” Investors have now put $65 million into Hadrian.

Image: Hadrian/GPT Image 2.5