Hadrian Raises $40 Million to Fight AI-Powered Hackers With AI Agents
What happened: Amsterdam-based Hadrian announced a $40 million funding round on October 6, 2026, to scale its agentic AI offensive security platform — bringing its total funding to $65 million as AI-driven cyberattacks escalate. Why it matters: Attackers now move at machine speed, and Hadrian bets the only practical defense is AI agents that think like hackers.
Dateline: Amsterdam, October 6, 2026
What happened
Hadrian, an agentic AI offensive security platform, raised $40 million in a round co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin, with participation from existing investors HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures. The funding brings the company’s total raised to $65 million and will bankroll expansion across EMEA and the U.S., plus deeper investment in engineering and research.
Details: Atlas and Nova
Hadrian combines continuous exposure management and agentic penetration testing in one platform. Its two products are Atlas, which continuously maps an organization’s external attack surface and uses purpose-built AI agents to check which exposures are actually exploitable, and Nova, which provides agentic penetration testing on demand. Because the two share context, security teams can move from continuous visibility to deeper testing without starting over. The company claims customers see 10x greater visibility into critical exposures and 80% faster time to resolution. Hadrian works with companies in the U.S. and Europe including McKesson, NBC Universal, Total Energies, Amadeus, Leroy Merlin and Damen Shipyard. The company was founded by Rogier Fischer, Olivier Beg and Maurice Clin.
Why this round landed now
The timing is no accident. Headlines in recent weeks have covered AI agents escaping test environments and Anthropic’s disclosure that criminals and state-linked groups used its models to automate whole attack chains and write zero-day exploits. Meanwhile, Hadrian cites data showing 87% of organizations still run manual pentests, and more than 70% of security teams struggle to determine which exposures are actually exploitable — only 0.47% of vulnerability scanner findings proved genuinely exploitable, it says. Those numbers, if even close to right, describe an industry drowning in noise while attacks accelerate.
Why it matters
This is offense sold as defense. Rather than bolting AI onto dashboards, Hadrian emulates hackers’ attack paths continuously — the idea being that you can’t defend an attack surface you haven’t mapped, and you can’t map it fast enough by hand anymore. The subscriber take: penetration testing has always been an expensive, periodic ritual — you pay a firm, they test, you get a PDF, things drift. If agentic pentesting on demand actually delivers “human-pentest level and beyond” results, the ritual becomes continuous. Watch the claimed 5x ROI and retention rates the investors cited — enterprise security contracts renew (or die) on those numbers, and that will tell you whether this is real or another security pitch deck.
Frequently asked questions
What is Hadrian?
Hadrian is an Amsterdam-based offensive security platform that uses purpose-built AI agents to continuously map a company’s external attack surface and validate which exposures are genuinely exploitable, plus on-demand agentic penetration testing.
How much has Hadrian raised in total?
The $40 million round brings Hadrian’s total funding to $65 million.
Who led Hadrian’s $40 million round?
The round was co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin, with existing investors HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures participating.
What are Atlas and Nova?
Atlas is Hadrian’s continuous attack-surface mapping product that validates which exposures are exploitable; Nova is its agentic penetration-testing-on-demand product. The two share context so teams can move from discovery to deep testing without starting from scratch.
Sources: Business Wire (Hadrian announcement), Tech Startups (funding roundup)