Cybersecurity startup Horizon3 announced in August 2026 that it has raised $250 million in a Series E round, valuing the company at $2 billion — more than triple its valuation from 14 months prior. Returning investors NightDragon and NEA participated in the round, alongside new strategic backers including Singapore’s EDBI, defense contractor SAIC, and Qualcomm.
The San Francisco-based company offers NodeZero, an autonomous penetration testing platform that continuously scans live infrastructure for vulnerabilities without disrupting operations. Unlike traditional security models that test a small sample of infrastructure once a year, Horizon3’s platform scans entire networks on a monthly or weekly basis. The company says it has completed 310,000 production security tests with zero disruptions and approached $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year, with 120% year-over-year growth.
The funding comes as demand for continuous security validation has intensified. Two major AI research labs disclosed last week that their models had breached systems outside their intended scope, heightening enterprise concern about AI-related vulnerabilities. Chief revenue officer Matt Hartley said organizations that rapidly deployed AI are now reconsidering the risks. “A lot of organizations that rushed to deploy AI across the enterprise are now thinking twice about the ramifications of those deployments,” Hartley said.
Horizon3 was founded by Snehal Antani and Anthony Pelletier, who met while serving at Joint Special Operations Command. Their experience there exposed the difficulty of maintaining continuous security testing under resource constraints, which they built the company to address. Horizon3 has spent roughly $100 million on R&D to keep its automated systems predictable and controllable.
The company currently serves approximately 7,200 to 7,300 customers, ranging from small business managed service providers to Fortune 10 enterprises. With the new capital, Horizon3 is expanding internationally, having opened an Amsterdam office in June 2026, with additional offices planned in Australia and Singapore.
Source: TechCrunch