Horizon3 has raised $250 million in an oversubscribed Series E financing round at a valuation exceeding $2 billion. The valuation is more than three times the $650 million valuation Horizon3 received during its Series D financing slightly more than a year earlier.
NightDragon and New Enterprise Associates co-led the round. New investors Acrew Capital, Blue Cloud Ventures, Demeter Group, EDBI, PSG, SAIC and Sapphire Ventures participated alongside returning investors Craft Ventures, Prosperity7 Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Ridge Ventures and SignalFire.
Horizon3 develops NodeZero, an autonomous penetration testing and proactive security platform that tests organizations’ production environments to identify exploitable attack paths.
The platform examines how attackers could combine misconfigurations, compromised credentials and identity-management weaknesses to gain access to critical systems. It then provides remediation guidance and verifies whether identified vulnerabilities were successfully fixed.
NodeZero can also deploy honeypots while examining an environment, helping customers detect whether attackers have entered their systems.
Horizon3 said its annual recurring revenue increased by 120% year over year. The company now serves more than 7,000 organizations, including multinational banks, healthcare networks, government agencies and four Fortune 10 companies.
The platform has autonomously completed approximately 310,000 security tests in production environments. Horizon3 is also FedRAMP High authorized and supports compliance with frameworks and regulations including DORA, NIS 2, NIST CSF 2.0, HIPAA, SOC 2 and GDPR.
The company plans to use the Series E financing to expand its sales, marketing and channel operations across enterprise, middle-market and federal customers.
Horizon3 will also enter Singapore and Australia while expanding its operations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Product investments will include autonomous defensive agents capable of remediating findings identified through NodeZero penetration tests. The company intends to create a continuous learning cycle connecting AI-powered attackers and AI-powered defenders.
As part of the financing, NightDragon founder and CEO Dave DeWalt and NightDragon Managing Director Morgan Kyauk will join Horizon3’s board of directors. DeWalt previously served as CEO of FireEye and McAfee.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
“This round gives us the fuel to scale aggressively as the definitive leader of the AI vs. AI era.”
Snehal Antani, Co-Founder and CEO of Horizon3
“Horizon3 coined the concept of cyber warfare being AI vs. AI, and that future has arrived. Snehal and his team have built an unparalleled proactive security platform that is fundamentally reshaping how the world defends its data.”
Dave DeWalt, Founder and CEO of NightDragon
“Horizon3 has demonstrated textbook operational excellence. They have 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.”
Morgan Kyauk, Managing Director at NightDragon
