Hadrian, an Amsterdam and London-based hacker-led cybersecurity startup that offers an event-based, offensive security platform in a SaaS model, announced on Friday (June 24) that it has raised €10.5M in an unsolicited Seed round of funding. The company has raised €13M in funding, to date. Prior to this, Hadrian raised €2.5M in its pre-Seed round.
Hadrian says the proceeds will be used to onboard new hackers, development and sales talent, consolidate European markets, and prepare for expansion into the US.
Investors in this round
The round was led by HV Capital with participation from Picus Capital, Slimmer AI and a few angel investors, including Adriaan Mol, Koen Köppen and Niklas Hellman.
Jasper Masemann, Partner at HV Capital, says, “HV sees a massive need for Hadrian’s offensive security approach made out of Europe. I am extremely impressed with how strong their unique approach to AI models and advanced automation of simulating cyberattacks already is. Thanks to the team’s vast expertise and track record I am very confident they will be able to grab a huge slice of the security market.”
About Hadrian
The cybersecurity startup was founded by a group of hackers and developers after they saw cyber attackers using AI and red teams failing to keep up. Cybercrime damages for 2020 are estimated to reach $1T. “We simply do not have enough experts in the world to keep the criminals out,” says co-founder Rogier Fischer.
Founded in 2021 by Olivier Beg, Rogier Fischer, Tijl van Vliet, and Maurice Clin, Hadrian aims to renovate proactive security and make security insights autonomous and scalable. The cybersecurity startup offers automated security insights through its AI-driven testing SaaS platform. The company enables detailed attack surface management and risk prioritisation.
Hadrian claims to continually and continuously scan and analyse businesses’ IT infrastructures using cloud-native technologies and ML modules to deliver quick, accurate, and comprehensive insights. Dedicated to creating a quicker, precise, and scalable solution to offensive security, its team is made up of hackers and engineers from over 15 different nationalities.
CEO Rogier Fischer says, “Hadrian understands that CISOs and their teams can’t be expected to attend to every potential threat across the attack surface. As companies are overwhelmed by cybercrime, the unique value of hackers’ outside-in approach to security becomes more important. Our autonomous technology identifies real threats and prioritises where the action is needed, connecting urgent tasks to existing workflow tools and processes so that the important stuff gets handled first.”
“The nature of cyber attacks is changing”
Defensive security teams find it more challenging to monitor and secure growing and decentralised internet attacks that surfaces for businesses. According to ESG reports, 30 to 40 per cent of a company’s attack surface is unknown to the IT personnel responsible for securing it. The issue has been made worse by the quick development of IoT, cloud-sharing technologies, APIs, and work-from-home solutions in response to the Covid-19 pandemic demand.
The nature of cyber attacks is also changing as cybercriminals are now automating their attacks to target thousands of companies at the same time.
According to a report by the cybersecurity professional organisation (ISC), businesses are now hampered by a serious lack of qualified workers, with just 700,000 security specialists expected to enter the Infosecurity field by 2021 against 2.7 million open positions. By scanning too extensively, picking up false positives that overwhelm CISOs, and underplaying serious risks, existing defence solutions frequently make issues worse by leaving security teams with mountains of data streams but no clear priorities.
Hadrian says it is taking a unique, efficient approach, and has already landed several key customers in financial services, industrials, and property management. The company’s platform scans the entire attack surface automatically and continuously, exposing unknown weaknesses throughout a company’s digital infrastructure. Hadrian can recognise and rank the most serious dangers using the outside-in perspective. These threats are then added to workflow procedures for agents’ attention, depending on their seriousness.
Cross-asset tests also enable a vulnerability or insight revealed in one asset to trigger a test in another asset; for example, a list of credentials discovered on the darkweb triggers an additional test on a previously discovered internet-facing database. This unique, event-based mechanism sets Hadrian apart from competitor technologies that test for weaknesses but are limited in the extent to which they allow for different events to interact with each other.
Hadrian says the modular nature of its technology combines ML and AI modules to accurately mimic a hacker’s creativity. The platform is able to scan billions of assets daily to create near-real-time insights on digital threats and attack vectors. Hadrian’s data stream includes clear defence priorities, and it integrates easily into existing CISO’s workflow tech stacks.
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