Amsterdam-based Hadrian announced that it had raised an additional $40 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $65 million. The round was led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin, with participation from existing investors HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital, and Oetker Ventures.
The company plans to use the new capital to expand into markets across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the United States, while also increasing investment in its engineering and research teams. Hadrian was founded in 2021 by Rogier Fischer, chief executive officer; Olivier Beg, head of hacking; and Maurice Clin, head of business development. All three have backgrounds in ethical hacking or entrepreneurship.
An Offensive Platform That Operates Continuously
Hadrian offers an AI-native offensive security platform that combines continuous exposure management with agent-based penetration testing. The platform includes two main components: Atlas, which continuously maps an organization’s external attack surface and uses AI agents to verify whether exposures are exploitable, and Nova, which provides on-demand penetration testing.
The company says the platform does not merely collect the results of scanning tools. Instead, it attempts to simulate attack paths to verify exploitable risks, then prioritize them and link them to remediation efforts. The system can also independently verify whether vulnerability fixes have been successful.
What Changes in Practice?
Hadrian ties its development to the gap between the speed of AI-powered attackers and the ability of defense teams to conduct testing and investigations manually. According to figures cited by the company, 87% of organizations still conduct manual penetration testing, while only 0.47% of vulnerability-scanning tool findings are actually exploitable. Based on this estimate, teams focus on a large number of alerts that do not require action.
Hadrian claims that its customers achieved a tenfold increase in visibility into critical risks, a fivefold improvement in return on investment compared with manual penetration testing, and an 80% acceleration in remediation time. These results were stated by the company, and the source did not provide details about the measurement methodology or sample size.
Why Does This News Matter?
The funding reflects growing competition in the offensive testing automation market, where companies are attempting to transform AI from a tool for analyzing alerts into a system that performs repeated discovery and verification operations. Hadrian’s importance for organizations does not lie in replacing human judgment, but in expanding the scope of continuous testing and verification while keeping task definition and key security decisions in the hands of human teams, according to the company’s description.
However, the source does not establish that the platform can cover all environments or replace specialized testing. It also does not clarify the limits of the authority granted to the agents or the mechanisms used to prevent testing from affecting production systems. Therefore, the value of these platforms remains tied to the accuracy of their verification, the scope of assets they can access, and security teams’ ability to review the results before taking remediation actions.