The company announced the round on August 3, 2026. New investors include Acrew Capital, Blue Cloud Ventures, Demeter Group, Singapore’s EDBI, PSG, SAIC and Sapphire Ventures. Existing backers Craft Ventures, Prosperity7 Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Ridge Ventures and SignalFire also participated. NightDragon founder Dave DeWalt and managing director Morgan Kyauk join the board.
More than 7,000 customers and 310,000 autonomous pentests
Horizon3 reports that over 7,000 organizations now use NodeZero, which runs penetration tests against production environments without human operators. The company says the platform has executed 310,000 tests in live customer environments. Co-founder and CEO Snehal Antani, a former US Special Operations Command CTO, states the company spent six years earning the right to autonomously pentest critical networks with no humans in the loop. The 120 percent ARR growth figure comes from the company’s own release and has not been independently audited.
For founders, the sequencing is instructive. Horizon3 sold a continuously repeatable product, testing that security controls actually work, rather than a one-off consulting engagement, which turned a traditionally project-based market into recurring revenue.
Offensive AI accelerates demand for machine-speed defense
Horizon3 positions the round around what it calls the AI versus AI era: attackers using AI to find and exploit weaknesses faster than human defenders can respond. The new capital is earmarked for go-to-market expansion, international growth in Singapore, Australia and EMEA, and further product development. The round lands in a week of heavy security funding, alongside Zenity’s 125 million dollar Series C for AI agent security announced the same day.