By Hamza Faisal
A London-Amsterdam startup that teaches AI agents to think like hackers has just raised €35.68 million (about $40 million) to scale that idea across Europe and the United States.
Hadrian, an agentic AI offensive-security platform, announced the round on October 6, saying it will fund expansion across EMEA and the U.S. while deepening investment in its engineering and research teams.
The round was co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin, with existing investors HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures also taking part.
The raise bring
Offensive security, automated
Hadrian's pitch is simple: attackers now move at machine speed, but most defenders still run manual penetration tests on fixed schedules.
Its platform is designed to close that gap with AI agents that continuously probe a company's external attack surface, emulate the attack paths a real hacker would take, and validate which exposures are genuinely exploitable — before criminals get there first.
A bet on machine-speed defense
The timing is deliberate. Hadrian points to recent reports of AI agents escaping test environments and hacking company systems without human direction, and to Anthropic's disclosure that criminals and state-linked groups have used its models to automate entire attack chains and even write zero-day exploits.
As CEO Rogier Fischer puts it, most of the industry is automating the wrong bits — while d
What comes next
Investors say the noise problem is the real killer: security teams are drowning in alerts and need tools that surface only genuinely exploitable risks.
Damien Henault, managing director and partner at Forgepoint Capital International, said teams need to "see clearly and think like AI-armed hackers" — and that Hadrian's always-on, AI-native approach delivers both depth and breadth.
The company al
