Hadrian raises $40m to expand AI offensive security business in the US

Hadrian, the Amsterdam-founded cybersecurity startup, has raised $40 million (€35.68 million) to expand across the United States and EMEA and strengthen its engineering and research teams. The financing backs a company already serving US enterprises, rather than marking its first entry into the American market.

Announced on October 6, 2026, the round was co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin, with participation from existing investors HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures. It brings Hadrian’s total funding to $65 million.

Chief executive Rogier Fischer told Tech Funding News that most of the proceeds would go towards research and development, with a significant portion allocated to US expansion. The company did not disclose its valuation or revenue.

Building on an existing American presence

Hadrian has about 90 employees and offices in Amsterdam, London and New York, Fischer told Tech Funding News. Neither the funding announcement nor the accompanying coverage specifies a new US office, a local hiring target or a timetable for the expansion.

The company names McKesson, NBCUniversal and Francisco Partners among its customers, alongside European businesses including TotalEnergies, Amadeus, Leroy Merlin and Damen Shipyard. That gives the US push an existing enterprise customer base to build on, although Hadrian has not disclosed how much revenue comes from either side of the Atlantic.

Founded in Amsterdam in 2021 by Fischer, Olivier Beg and Maurice Clin, Hadrian previously raised a €2.5 million pre-seed round in 2021 and a €10.5 million seed round led by HV Capital in 2022, according to The Next Web. Fischer and Beg began as teenage ethical hackers; Fischer later co-founded cryptocurrency exchange LiteBit.

Automating the attacker’s perspective

Hadrian sells offensive security software: tools that probe an organisation’s systems as an attacker would, helping security teams identify exploitable weaknesses before criminals do. Its proposition is to combine continuous monitoring of externally accessible systems with deeper, on-demand penetration testing.

Atlas maps an organisation’s external attack surface and uses AI agents to assess which exposures can actually be exploited. Nova provides on-demand agentic penetration testing. According to the company’s announcement, the products share context, allowing security teams to move from identifying an exposure to testing it more deeply without starting again.

Hadrian says humans set the mission and retain important decisions while AI performs the intervening work. The commercial argument is that software can deliver the repetition and round-the-clock coverage that manual testing teams cannot sustain.

“So we built a platform that emulates hackers’ attack paths, helping our customers to understand their key risks and prioritise their security resources appropriately,” Fischer said in the funding announcement.

The company reports tenfold greater visibility into critical exposures, 80% faster resolution and five times the return on investment compared with manual penetration testing. Those are company-reported results; the supplied announcement does not provide the methodology or customer sample behind them.

The US growth proposition

Hadrian is positioning the expansion around two linked problems: attackers’ growing use of AI and security teams’ difficulty separating exploitable weaknesses from large volumes of alerts. Its pitch is therefore not simply more testing, but clearer prioritisation of what needs fixing.

It faces competition from other automated offensive security businesses, with Tech Funding News identifying XBOW, Horizon3 and Armadin as peers. Hadrian’s claimed differentiation is the combination of continuous exposure management and agentic penetration testing in one platform.

For its American expansion, the strategic task is to turn an existing office and customer relationships into a broader enterprise business while continuing to develop the underlying technology. The funding supports both aims, but the announcement leaves the scale and timing of US execution open.