The North American company Horizon3 has started its activity in Spain and Portugal with its own local team. The company, based in San Francisco (United States) has just closed a new financing round of 250 million dollars (approximately 215.5 million euros), with a valuation of more than 2,000 million dollars (approximately 1,724 million euros), a figure that triples that reached just over a year ago.
Horizon3, which will target the large account market in our country, has just signed an agreement for Spain with the wholesaler Exclusive Networks, a cybersecurity specialist, and will operate through a network of integrators and service providers. It should be noted that Horizon3 has recently announced an investment of $20 million specifically to develop its global partner ecosystem. The company, which has been operating for seven years and provides service to more than 7,000 clients, considers that Spain is one of the most attractive European markets.
NodeZero, its own technology
Horizon3’s NodeZero platform autonomously, controlled, and continuously attacks an organization’s own production environment, revealing how a real attacker could chain misconfigurations, weak credentials, and identity gaps to compromise critical systems.
The tool, which has already executed nearly 330,000 penetration tests (pentests) safely in production environments, also offers specific correction guidelines and instantly checks whether the applied solutions have really resolved the detected flaw. You can also deploy digital honeypots as a quick and effective method of detecting whether an attacker using AI has managed to enter the system.
This market-first technological capability has enabled 120% year-over-year growth in recurring revenue for the company, which currently protects more than 7,000 organizations around the world, including multinational banks, large healthcare networks, and four Fortune 10 companies. Horizon3 has FedRAMP® High security clearance from the United States Government and helps its clients comply with regulatory frameworks such as DORA, NIS 2, NIST CSF 2.0, HIPAA, SOC 2 and the RGPD (GDPR), the latter of special relevance for organizations operating in Spain and the rest of the EU. The company has also recently been recognized as the fastest growing in the cybersecurity sector in North America, according to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and Fast Company rankings.
As mentioned before, following the capital increase, Horizon3 will also invest in accelerating technological development to create a continuous learning cycle between AI-based attack and defense systems, including new autonomous defense tools capable of directly correcting failures detected by NodeZero®.
About the financing round
The round, which received a volume of applications much higher than the capital finally raised, has been co-led by existing investors NightDragon and NEA, with the incorporation of seven new investors – Acrew, Blue Cloud Ventures, EDBI (Singapore), Demeter Group, PSG, SAIC and Sapphire – and the participation of five recurring investors (Craft Ventures, Prosperity7 Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Ridge Ventures and SignalFire).
Horizon3 will also invest in creating a learning cycle between AI-based attack and defense systems
As part of the operation, Dave DeWalt, founder and CEO of NightDragon and former CEO of FireEye and McAfee; and Morgan Kyauk, CEO of NightDragon, join the Horizon3 Board of Directors.
According to Snehal Antani, co-founder and CEO of Horizon3, “We were the first to develop the concept of AI hackers, and we have spent six years earning the right to autonomously perform penetration tests on the world’s most critical and sensitive networks, without human intervention.” “This investment” -Antani adds- “allows us to grow strongly and consolidate ourselves as an undisputed benchmark in this new stage of cybersecurity.”
