Horizon3 raises USD $250 million at over USD $2 billion

Horizon3 has raised USD $250 million in a Series E funding round, valuing the cybersecurity company at more than USD $2 billion.

The round was co-led by existing investors NightDragon and NEA and included seven new investors alongside five returning backers. New investors were Acrew, Blue Cloud Ventures, EDBI, Demeter Group, PSG, SAIC and Sapphire. Existing investors participating in the round were Craft Ventures, Prosperity7 Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Ridge Ventures and SignalFire.

The funding marks a sharp rise from Horizon3's USD $650 million valuation at its previous Series D round a little over a year ago. The latest round was oversubscribed.

Horizon3 sells NodeZero, a platform that tests an organisation's production environment by simulating attacks to identify weak points and verify whether fixes have worked. The company has now carried out 310,000 tests in live production settings.

Growth has been rapid. Annual recurring revenue rose 120% year on year, and Horizon3 now serves more than 7,000 organisations worldwide, including multinational banks, healthcare networks and four Fortune 10 companies.

The fresh capital will be directed to three areas: expanding sales, marketing and channel operations; entering Singapore and Australia while extending its presence in Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and developing new product features focused on automated remediation.

Part of that regional push will focus on Asia-Pacific. Horizon3 plans to establish its ASEAN headquarters and a Regional Centre of Excellence in Singapore, while increasing local teams in Australia, Singapore and Japan.

"This is a major milestone for Horizon3 in the region. It will help accelerate our growth across key markets, build critical regional skills, expand local teams in Australia, Singapore and Japan, and strengthen our presence on the ground," said Gareth Cox, Vice President of Sales, APJ, Horizon3.

The financing also brings changes to the board. Dave DeWalt, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of NightDragon and former Chief Executive Officer of FireEye and McAfee, and Morgan Kyauk, Managing Director at NightDragon, will join Horizon3's Board of Directors.

DeWalt linked the investment to broader shifts in cyber risk. "Horizon3 coined the concept of cyber warfare being AI vs. AI, and that future has arrived," he said. "Snehal and his team have built an unparalleled proactive security platform that is fundamentally reshaping how the world defends its data. I am thrilled to join the board to help Horizon3 secure the world's most critical infrastructure and enterprises at scale."

Kyauk pointed to the company's operating model and sales execution. "Horizon3 has demonstrated textbook operational excellence," he said. "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."

Regional expansion

Singapore's state-backed investment platform is among the new investors through EDBI, an arm of SG Growth Capital. The investment aligns with Horizon3's plan to use Singapore as a base for its Southeast Asian operations.

"Cybersecurity companies today are making long-term decisions about where to anchor their engineering, product and regional leadership capabilities. Horizon3's plans to establish its ASEAN headquarters and a Regional Centre of Excellence in Singapore demonstrate confidence in the depth of our talent, digital infrastructure and innovation ecosystem. We look forward to supporting the company's next phase of growth and its continued contribution to Singapore's cybersecurity ecosystem," said Li.

Product focus

Horizon3's pitch to customers centres on automated offensive testing to identify exploitable attack paths before intruders do. Its software can also deploy honeypots during testing to help detect attackers already inside a network.

Snehal Antani, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Horizon3, said the company will use the new funding to deepen that approach. "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," said Antani. "Our massive data moat - built on 310,000 tests safely executed in production - combined with thousands of radical champions who love our product, has allowed us to achieve consistent top-tier financial and operational metrics. This round gives us the fuel to scale aggressively as the definitive leader of the AI vs. AI era."

Antani also said Horizon3 wants to move further into automated remediation as security teams face growing pressure from attackers, regulators and insurers. "It has never been harder for CIOs and CISOs. Attackers are getting faster, enterprise IT is becoming more complex, and regulators and cyber insurers are becoming more punitive," he said. "We're about to see an explosion of vulnerabilities, most of which won't matter, but a small percentage will be immediately exploitable. The goal of running pentests isn't to find problems, it's to quickly fix exploitable problems that matter. We started with pentesting, evolved to be a proactive security platform, and will now accelerate remediation by creating AI learning loops between attackers and defenders."