Amsterdam’s Hadrian raises $40M for AI-powered offensive security

Hadrian, an Amsterdam-based offensive security startup, has raised $40 million in a growth round co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and Smartfin, bringing the company’s total funding to $65 million. The firm said the capital will be used to expand operations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the United States, and to hire additional engineers and researchers. Existing backers that participated include HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures.

“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,” said Rogier Fischer, Hadrian’s chief executive and a co‑founder of the company. Fischer founded Hadrian in 2021 with Olivier Beg and Maurice Clin.

What Hadrian builds and how it measures impact

Hadrian provides offensive security software that simulates how attackers probe and exploit systems, allowing organisations to remediate vulnerabilities before criminals can. The platform is composed of two principal components:

• Atlas — maps everything a company exposes to the internet and uses AI agents to assess which flaws are genuine.
• Nova — performs automated penetration tests on request, executing simulated attacks at scale.

The company reports that customers identify 10 times as many critical risks, remediate issues 80% faster, and receive five times the return compared with traditional manual testing. Hadrian’s stated client roster includes McKesson, NBCUniversal, TotalEnergies, Amadeus, Leroy Merlin and Damen Shipyards.

Market context and investor outlook

Investors framed the round around the rapid shift toward AI-driven attack techniques. Saumitra Dubey, a partner at Smartfin, said the firm will back Hadrian’s ambition to reach “a nine-figure revenue business.” The financing follows earlier rounds: a €2.5 million pre-seed in 2021 and a €10.5 million seed round led by HV Capital in 2022.

Hadrian pointed to broader pressures on security teams: it says 87% of firms still perform testing manually, and that only 0.47% of the flaws flagged by conventional scanning tools are actually exploitable by attackers. The company’s message gains urgency after recent industry reporting that threat actors and state-linked groups have tested large language models for offensive uses. One cited analysis covered misuse of the Claude models between December 2025 and August 2026, underscoring how AI is reshaping both attacks and defenses.

Outlook

With $40 million in fresh capital, Hadrian aims to scale its engineering and research teams while expanding sales and support across EMEA and the US. The co-founders’ backgrounds — Fischer and Beg began as teenage ethical hackers, and Fischer later co-founded the LiteBit crypto exchange — are being leveraged to accelerate product development and enterprise adoption. As organisations contend with AI-augmented threats, Hadrian is positioning its automated offensive tooling as a way to increase the volume and fidelity of security testing while reducing time to remediation.