Cybersecurity startup Horizon3 has raised a $250 million Sequence E at a $2 billion valuation, greater than tripling its valuation in 14 months. The San Francisco-based agency drew backing from returning traders NightDragon and NEA.
The funding arrives as two main AI analysis labs disclosed final week that their fashions had breached methods exterior their meant scope. Horizon3, which has spent six years constructing AI particularly designed to probe networks for vulnerabilities in a managed, licensed method, is using rising enterprise demand. With AI-driven attacks accelerating, enterprises are dashing to stress-test their defenses at scale, a spot that conventional safety distributors have largely left unfilled.
Matt Hartley, the corporate’s chief income officer, mentioned that its NodeZero platform has two core strengths: It will possibly take a look at reside methods with out shutting down operations, a functionality different AI-powered instruments have struggled to ship reliably, and it scans a complete infrastructure constantly moderately than yearly, analyzing the complete community moderately than simply 2-3%.
The corporate approached $100 million in annual recurring income final 12 months with 120% year-over-year progress,and expects to speed up progress this 12 months, Hartley mentioned.
AI instruments have made it simpler for attackers to develop new exploits shortly, forcing safety groups to deal with threats sooner than they’ll repair them. Horizon3 spent roughly $100 million in R&D constructing automated methods designed to remain predictable and controllable, Hartley mentioned. That’s vital given latest breaches at AI labs, which raised questions on whether or not any AI system can really stay contained.
“It’s additionally making folks much more cautious about how they deploy AI,” Hartley mentioned. “We’re getting quite a lot of questions at present round: are you able to detect AI? After all we are able to. However I believe quite a lot of organizations that rushed to deploy AI throughout the enterprise at the moment are considering twice concerning the ramifications of these deployments; what if my very own safety group will get too aggressive, might there be unintended penalties? So quite a lot of organizations are shifting into what I’d name a daring new world, which is strictly why you want constant, predictable testing from an organization like Horizon3, to know how one can strengthen your individual defenses towards real-world exploits.”
In a press release, Horizon3 has run 310,000 manufacturing safety assessments with zero disruptions, establishing what it calls ‘AI Hackers’, absolutely autonomous penetration testing.
The actual competitors isn’t different software program distributors; it’s the present mannequin, in accordance with Hartley. Most firms rent human safety corporations to run annual assessments and people gained’t disappear, he continued. What’s shifting is what shoppers demand after signing up: As an alternative of sampling 5% of infrastructure as soon as yearly, they now wish to scan every thing month-to-month or weekly, monitoring whether or not they’re really getting safer.
Horizon3’s founders, Snehal Antani and Anthony Pelletier, met whereas serving at Joint Particular Operations Command, the place they noticed firsthand how useful resource constraints made steady safety testing tough. They based Horizon3 to automate these repetitive assessments.
With the funding, Horizon3 is increasing internationally,together with new workplaces in Amsterdam (in June 2026), Australia, and Singapore, whereas constructing a associate community and sustaining substantial R&D spending.
Strategic traders now embody Singapore’s EDBI, protection contractor SAIC, and Qualcomm, signaling that the vulnerability they’re addressing extends properly past any single sector.
Horizon3 has roughly 7,200 to 7,300 prospects, starting from managed service suppliers serving small companies to Fortune 10 enterprises. The corporate claims an addressable market of tens of billions of {dollars}, a determine that aligns with business estimates of the broader cybersecurity market, valued at $271.9 billion in 2025 and projected to achieve $663.2 billion by 2033, in accordance with Grand View Research.
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