Automated security penetration-testing-as-a-service startup Horizon3.ai Inc. has raised $8.5M in a Series A funding led by SignalFire to accelerate its product roadmap and go-to-market strategy.

Founded in 2019 by former Splunk Inc. Chief Technology Officer Snehal Antani and Anthony Pillitiere, former deputy CTO within U.S. Special Operations Command, Horizon3.ai offers automated penetration testing designed to allow companies to see themselves through the eyes of an attacker. The idea is that a company can proactively find and fix attack vectors before they can be exploited.

Pentesting in the cybersecurity industry is not a new concept. According to Horizon3.ai, issues arise when companies run their pen tests, vulnerability scanners and other legacy assessment services, which often result in thousands of critical findings that leave security teams overwhelmed and unable to prioritize, given limited time and resources.

“CISOs are overwhelmed trying to prioritize critical security findings and are struggling to decide what NOT to fix, but being vulnerable doesn’t mean you’re exploitable,” Chief Executive Antani said in a statement. “Our thesis is to help enterprises look at their environment through the eyes of the attacker to identify ineffective security controls and fix security issues that are most likely to be exploited by attackers.”

Horizon3.ai’s fully automated NodeZero solution assesses the attack surface of a hybrid cloud – cloud-native, on-premises, edge and “internet of things” — and does not require agents to be installed or attack scripts to be written or maintained. The solution discovers and fingerprints an attack surface, identifying the ways exploitable vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, harvested credentials and dangerous product defaults can be chained together to facilitate a compromise.

Using the solution, “security teams can now spend their resources fixing what matters most, automatically reaping the benefits of continuous APTaaS, all at a fraction of the cost of legacy tools,” CTO Pillitiere added.

Image: Horizon3.ai