Hadrian, which develops an agentic AI platform for offensive security, has closed a $40 million funding round led jointly by Forgepoint Capital International and Smart Fin. The investment, which includes participation from returning backers HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures, brings the company's cumulative funding to $65 million.
The Berlin-based startup, founded by Rogier Fischer, Olivier Beg and Maurice Clin, is addressing a critical gap in modern cybersecurity: while attackers increasingly automate their operations through AI, many organisations still depend on labour-intensive manual penetration testing. Hadrian's technology tackles this mismatch by automating the identification and prioritisation of exploitable security weaknesses across an organisation's external-facing infrastructure.
The platform operates through two complementary products. Atlas continuously scans an organisation's external attack surface, deploying purpose-built AI agents to identify which exposures can actually be exploited. Nova delivers on-demand agentic penetration testing. Since both products share context, security teams can transition from ongoing monitoring directly into deeper testing without losing continuity.
Hadrian's approach balances automation with human oversight: AI agents execute tasks and run continuous assessments, while humans establish objectives and make critical decisions. According to the company, this hybrid model delivers tenfold greater visibility into critical exposures and cuts resolution time by 80 percent compared with traditional approaches, while generating a fivefold return on investment versus manual penetration testing.
We have been working with LLMs since before they went mainstream, and we know that AI can work much faster than any human offensive security team. So we built a platform that emulates hackers' attack paths, helping our customers to understand their key risks and prioritise their security resources appropriately.
Rogier Fischer, CEO of Hadrian
Hadrian's client roster spans both continents and includes McKesson, NBC Universal, Francisco Partners, Total Energies, Amadeus, Leroy Merlin and Damen Shipyard.
The company intends to deploy the new capital toward geographic expansion throughout EMEA and the United States, alongside strengthening its engineering and research capabilities.
Source: Tech.eu
