Horizon3, an AI-native security company, has raised US$250 million to reach a valuation of more than US$2 billion, tripling its valuation from US$650 million in just over a year.
The oversubscribed round was co-led by existing investors NightDragon and NEA, with participation from seven new investors and five returning backers.
Horizon3 said the capital underscores accelerating global demand for safe, autonomous security validation as AI-driven cyberattacks escalate.
“We invented the concept of AI Hackers and spent six years earning the right to autonomously pentest the most critical and sensitive networks in the world — with no humans in the loop,” said Snehal Antani, co-founder and CEO of Horizon3.
“Our massive data moat – built on 310,000 tests safely executed in production – combined with thousands of radical champions who love our product, has allowed us to achieve consistent top-tier financial and operational metrics,” said Antani.
Horizon3 said its NodeZero platform closes that gap by autonomously and safely attacking an organization’s own production environment. It reveals exactly how adversaries chain together misconfigurations, weak credentials, and identity gaps to compromise critical systems, provides fix guidance, and instantly verifies remediation.
Additionally, as NodeZero tests an environment, it can optimally deploy honeypots that are the cheapest, fastest, and most effective way of detecting AI attackers and prove they are inside.
Other participants in the latest funding round include new investors Acrew, Blue Cloud Ventures, EDBI (arm of SG Growth Capital, the investment platform of EDB and Enterprise Singapore), Demeter Group, PSG, SAIC, and Sapphire.
There were also existing investors such as Craft Ventures, Prosperity7 Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Ridge Ventures, and SignalFire.
As part of the investment, Dave DeWalt, founder and CEO of NightDragon and former CEO of FireEye and McAfee, and Morgan Kyauk, managing director at NightDragon, will join Horizon3’s board of directors.
“Horizon3 coined the concept of cyber warfare being AI vs. AI, and that future has arrived,” said DeWalt.
Kyauk said Horizon3 has built an “incredibly efficient, highly scalable go-to-market motion that will be further amplified by NightDragon’s ecosystem of partners, advisors, and global customers.”
Gareth Cox, Horizon3 VP of sales in APJ, said the latest funding will help accelerate the firm’s growth across key markets, build critical regional skills, and expand local teams in Australia, Singapore and Japan.
“We’re about to see an explosion of vulnerabilities, most of which won’t matter, but a small percentage will be immediately exploitable,” Antani added.
“The goal of running pentests isn’t to find problems, it’s to quickly fix exploitable problems that matter,” said Antani. “We started with pentesting, evolved to be a proactive security platform, and will now accelerate remediation by creating AI learning loops between attackers and defenders.”
