AI security startup HiddenLayer has raised $100 million in a Series B round led by Delta-v Capital, with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft’s M12, Booz Allen Hamilton, and others. The Austin-based company builds tools to protect AI models, agents, and workflows from adversarial attacks, vulnerabilities, and malicious code injections.
Co-founder and CEO Chris Sestito said the company’s annual recurring revenue grew more than tenfold over the past year, reaching the tens of millions of dollars, with over 90% of that growth driven by new customers, including large financial services firms, major tech companies, and contracts with the Department of Defense and intelligence community.
Sestito said the company’s core technology, spanning discovery, runtime protection, attack simulation, and supply chain security, has expanded in scope rather than changed fundamentally, now addressing risks like prompt injection, agent manipulation, and malicious tool use as AI deployments grow more common across enterprises. He highlighted growing efforts to verify open-source and open-weight models, noting the company scans dozens of AI file frameworks to detect hidden or mislabeled models.
The new funding will support expanded sales, engineering, and research efforts, along with growth into Europe and the broader EMEA region. HiddenLayer’s growth mirrors a broader surge in AI security spending, which analysts at Gartner estimate will approach $2.83 billion this year and nearly $4.78 billion in 2027.
Featured image: Credit: HiddenLayer
