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

Hadrian, an Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup, has raised $40m to expand in Europe and the US. Forgepoint Capital International and Smartfin co-led the round, which brings Hadrian’s total funding to $65m.

HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures were also among the existing investors.

Hadrian stated that the funds will be used to expand its operations in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the United States, as well as to hire more engineers and researchers.

Hadrian offers security software that is offensive in nature; it targets a company’s systems in the same way a hacker would, thereby allowing vulnerabilities to be repaired before criminals do.

The platform consists of two components: Atlas, which maps everything a company makes available on the internet and employs AI agents to determine which flaws are genuine; and Nova, which carries out automated hacking tests, referred to as penetration tests, on request.

According to Hadrian, customers spot 10 times as many critical risks, fix problems 80% faster, and get five times the return of manual testing. Its clients include McKesson, NBCUniversal, TotalEnergies, Amadeus, Leroy Merlin and Damen Shipyards.

The round comes as AI changes how attacks are carried out. Last month, Anthropic published a threat intelligence report showing that criminals and state-linked groups had used its Claude models to run attacks and hunt for new, unknown flaws. The Claude misuse report covered activity from December 2025 to August 2026.

Hadrian says many security teams cannot keep up. It says 87% of firms still test their systems by hand, and that only 0.47% of the flaws flagged by scanning tools can really be used by attackers.

“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.

Fischer set up the company in 2021 with Olivier Beg and Maurice Clin. Fischer and Beg began as teenage ethical hackers, and Fischer later co-founded LiteBit, one of Europe’s early crypto exchanges.

Saumitra Dubey, a partner at Smartfin, said the firm will back Hadrian’s plan to become “a nine-figure revenue business”.

Earlier, Hadrian raised a €2.5m pre-seed round in 2021 and a €10.5m seed round led by HV Capital in 2022.