Amsterdam’s Hadrian lands $40M to build an AI hacker policed by a second AI

Hadrian, the Amsterdam startup built by two teenage hackers, has raised $40 million in fresh funding. Forgepoint Capital International and Smartfin led the round, with HV, Motive Partners, Picus Capital and Oetker Ventures also joining in. The company says it has now raised $65 million in total.

Rogier Fischer and Olivier Beg met on an online forum when they were 13, and both were already earning bug bounties before they turned 14. Their early targets included PayPal, Yahoo and several major banks. Fischer says he started hacking at 12 and has never carried out any criminal activity. That origin story still shapes the business today: Hadrian was founded to automate the kind of security work the pair used to do by hand.

The company’s pitch is bluntly offensive. Its AI agents run more than 100 million attack simulations a day, and the Nova system, launched on March 24, performs AI-powered penetration tests on demand. Hadrian says it uses language models to replicate real attack paths, while another AI checks each action to keep the system from going off the rails. Fischer says the platform is meant to show customers where the real risk sits and help them spend security resources where they matter most.

Hadrian says most of the new money will go into research and development, with a meaningful slice reserved for expansion in the United States. The company did not disclose its valuation or revenue. It also says it now has about 90 employees and offices in Amsterdam, London and New York.

The timing matters because the category is getting crowded and expensive. XBOW, Horizon3 and Armadin have all raised far more capital, and Fischer himself says consolidation is already under way as pentesting, vulnerability management and attack simulation drift toward a single platform. Hadrian’s customers include McKesson, NBCUniversal, Francisco Partners, TotalEnergies, Amadeus, Leroy Merlin and Damen Shipyards.