Hadrian has raised a €2.5M pre-seed round to build the world’s first autonomous offensive security solution. The London and Amsterdam based cybersecurity startup’s pre-seed round was led by San Francisco-based Village Global and Amsterdam-based Slimmer AI.
Cybercrime is estimated to cost the world almost a trillion dollars in 2020 and is expected to tenfold by 2025. Hadrian’s fully autonomous proactive security solution can be described as the need of the hour. Co-founder Rogier Fischer says there are “not enough experts to keep the criminals out”.
Why do organisations need proactive security solution
Every year, the threat vector aimed at companies and individuals scales at a rapid pace. This acceleration of cyberattacks is what drove a group of hackers and developers from Amsterdam and London to start Hadrian. The cybersecurity startup works with the fundamental goal of improving digital security of global organisations.
Today, cyber attackers have become smarter to use AI and conventional methods are no longer capable of stopping these cyberthreats. With companies digitally transforming faster than ever before, it is important to implement a proactive security solution that makes security insights autonomous and scalable across an organisation.
How Hadrian stops threat with its cloud technology and machine learning
Hardian differs from traditional security solutions by offering a proactive security platform that does not require the installation of an agent. It also uses an outside perspective to run thousands of scans and tests on thousands of clients continuously and in parallel.
Since it is cloud-native and uses machine learning, the platform keeps constantly evolving with new tests designed by Hadrian’s ethical hackers. Since computing is getting complex and expansive, Hardian is able to find the ‘unknown unknowns’ in a customer’s infrastructures. Instead of testing just for threats, Hardian uses innovative event-driven testing to reduce its intrusiveness.
This event-driven testing can be adapted for different organisations and scaled for different business outcomes that achieves the high certainty of continuous monitoring. A modern security platform should not only be scalable, evolving with the holistic scope and support continuous monitoring but also support active learning.
Since cyber attackers have started using AI, Hadrian relies on the latest Machine Learning (ML) tools to further improve its network security. It uses test diversity and enriched frequency to improve its analytical dataset.
Another way Hadrian differs from traditional security solutions is by offering an autonomous red team. This allows for asset discovery and contextualisation that rely on unique passive and active scraping algorithms. Hadrian is able to understand how digital assets fit into a network using ML and memory algorithms. This results in mapping the attack surface of digital infrastructure in a faster and effective way.
The autonomous red team also monitors and tests digital assets to track changes while the machine-learning algorithms interpret the technical warnings discovered to alert about the critical digital risks. All of this results in finding about a threat surface even before they are executed to put digital assets at risk.
Meet the team
Hardian is founded by Rogier Fischer, Olivier Beg, Tijl van Vliet and Maurice Clin. Fischer co-founded LiteBit, a leading crypto trading platform at 17 and experienced the need for stellar cybersecurity defences first hand. With co-founder Olivier Beg, they earned substantial white-hat hacking bounties from companies like PayPal, Yahoo, and major banks before they turned 14.
Rogier and Olivier teamed up with Tijl van Vliet, an experienced cloud-architect, and Maurice Clin, an experienced entrepreneur, to launch Hadrian. It is also backed by a number of international angel investors and experts including Alex Weiss, managing partner of US-based cybersecurity fund ClearSky, Manuel Stotz, founder of UK-based Kingsway Capital, Riva-Melissa Tez, US-based AI venture investor, Chris Vogelzang, former CEO Danske Bank, specialist cyber security investors Grace Cassy and Jonathan Luff from CyLon and Alexander Ribbink, partner of Keen Venture Partners.