What is Hadrian? How an Offensive Cyber Startup Raised $40m

Hadrian, an Amsterdam-headquartered agentic AI offensive security platform, recently announced a US$40m funding round.

The backing brings total funding to US$65m and the firm highlights it will fund expansion across EMEA and the US and deepen investment in its engineering and research teams.

AI cybersecurity is arguably one of the enterprise world’s most pressing challenges and the technology has fundamentally upended the offensive security landscape.

The Loss of Control Observatory, part of The Centre for Long Term Resilience, recently highlighted that between July and August 2026, there were 11.3 incidents per day in the 30-day window ending 7 August, above the previous peak of 10.5 a day in March.

Unlike recent incidents disclosed by OpenAI and Anthropic, these incidents mostly concern externally deployed models that are in active use by businesses and individuals.

Here we unpack what Hadrian is, who leads it and why it is necessary in today’s enterprise environment.

Everyone can see that AI is changing the threat landscape. It might also hold the answer, but most people are focused on automating the wrong bits

Hadrian’s offensive security platform helps enterprise security teams identify, verify and close security gaps before they can be exploited

Hadrian combines continuous exposure management and agentic penetration testing in one platform. It claims to be the only vendor to offer this approach.

Its offering is divided across two cybersecurity platforms. Atlas continuously maps an organisation’s external attack surface and uses purpose-built AI agents to validate which exposures are actually exploitable. Its offering, Nova, provides agentic pentesting on demand on a human-pentest level and beyond.

We built a platform that emulates hackers’ attack paths, helping our customers to understand their key risks and prioritise their security resources appropriately

The company cited results from using the two capabilities that include:

Because the two functions share context, security teams can move from continuous visibility to deeper testing without starting from scratch.

He holds a BSc from the Delft University of Technology in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and an MBA from London Business School. He was the Co-Founder and CTO of LiteBit and has been an angel investor in a variety of startups. He was still an MBA student at London Business School when he co-founded the firm.

Olivier Beg, Chief Hacking Officer

Known by the handle smiegles, Olivier was a teenage hacking prodigy. He has previously held positions as a Web Application Security Specialist at Synack Red Team, and Advisor and Ethical Hacker to Insite Security BV and Head of Research at Zerocopter. He was recognised as a HackerOne Elite hacker in 2019.

Rogier and Olivier met in an online forum in 2009, when they were 13. The company claims that within a few years of knowing each other they were working as white-hat hackers for Dutch banks and global tech companies, and they watched attackers start using automation and AI while red teams still worked by hand.

Maurice Clin, Head of Business Development

He holds an MBA from the London Business School and studied at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. He has previously worked as an analyst at BNP Paribas and Verlinvest. He was still an MBA student when he co-founded the firm, a classmate of Rogier at London Business School.

News of AI agents escaping test environments and hacking company systems with no human direction have dominated headlines in recent times, such as the Hugging Face incident.

Bill Gates recently warned that unregulated AI poses a growing threat and predicted an escalation in AI-powered cyberattacks in the coming year, reports AFP.

The Microsoft co-founder said the risk of AI "getting out of control" remained years away and emphasised that the immediate concern was "bad people" using existing systems without safeguards, AFP reported.

“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.

“So we built a platform that emulates hackers’ attack paths, helping our customers to understand their key risks and prioritise their security resources appropriately.”

Hadrian’s US$40m funding round was co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin, with participation from existing investors HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures.

Co-Founder & Head of Business Development

Co-founder & Chief Hacking Officer