Hadrian, a Netherlands-based startup that uses AI agents to probe companies' internet-facing systems the way attackers would, has raised $40 million in a growth round, SiliconANGLE reported Tuesday. The round was co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and Smartfin and brings the company's total funding to $65 million.

What Happened

HV Capital, which led Hadrian's seed round in 2022, took part again, along with Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures. Hadrian said it will use the money to expand across Europe, the Middle East and Africa and in the U.S., and to hire more engineers and researchers.

The company was founded in 2021 by CEO Rogier Fischer, Olivier Beg and Maurice Clin. It sells two products. Atlas continuously maps an organization's external attack surface, the servers, applications and services visible from the internet, and uses AI agents to check which of the exposures it finds can actually be exploited. Nova runs agent-driven penetration tests on demand and shares context with Atlas, so a test can start from what the mapping has already discovered.

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Hadrian lists McKesson, NBCUniversal, TotalEnergies and Damen Shipyards among its customers. Smartfin partner Saumitra Dubey said the firm is backing the team's plan to build a business with nine-figure revenue.

Why It Matters

The core problem Hadrian targets is noise. Vulnerability scanners flag large numbers of potential issues, and security teams struggle to tell which ones matter. Hadrian cites figures that only 0.47% of scanner findings prove exploitable and that 87% of organizations still rely on manual penetration tests, which are typically run periodically rather than continuously and leave gaps between engagements.

Agent-based testing promises to close that gap by attempting exploitation automatically and continuously, then reporting only what works. Hadrian says its customers see 10 times more critical exposures and resolve issues 80% faster. Those figures come from the company and were not independently verified.

The pairing of Atlas and Nova is meant to address the gap between those two approaches: a continuous inventory that knows what is exposed, plus testing that can be triggered whenever something changes instead of waiting for the next scheduled engagement.

Investors and Market

Hadrian is competing in a crowded segment. Attack surface management and automated penetration testing vendors have been adding AI agents that chain reconnaissance and exploitation steps, and larger security platforms sell exposure management features of their own.

The round combines security specialists with industry-linked investors. Forgepoint is a cybersecurity-focused venture firm, while Oetker Ventures is tied to the German Oetker family business and Motive Partners focuses on financial technology.

What to Watch

Key questions are how quickly Hadrian builds a U.S. customer base against American rivals, and whether customers start replacing scheduled manual penetration tests with continuous agent-based testing or keep both. Regulators and auditors that require periodic manual tests in sectors such as finance will also shape how far agent-run testing can go.