The American company Horizon3, specialized in executing secure and autonomous attacks based on artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and remedy vulnerabilities against potential cyberattacks, has begun operating in Spain and Portugal with its own team in the region, according to the company.
Headquartered in San Francisco (United States), the firm has recently closed a new funding round of 250 million dollars (about 215.5 million euros), which raises its valuation above 2 billion dollars (around 1.724 billion euros), which means tripling the value reached just over a year ago.
To address the large accounts segment in the Spanish market, Horizon3 has signed a distribution agreement with the cybersecurity wholesaler Exclusive Networks and will deploy its offering through a network of integrators and specialized service providers.
In addition, the company has announced a specific investment of 20 million dollars aimed at boosting the growth and consolidation of its global ecosystem of 'partners'.
With seven years of experience and considering Spain as one of the most attractive destinations in Europe, Horizon3 currently serves more than 7,000 organizations on an international scale, including global banks, large hospital groups, and four companies included in the Fortune 10 list.
NodeZero and AI-driven growth
In the technological section, its own platform NodeZero performs autonomous, controlled, and continuous attacks on the productive environment of organizations to show how a real cybercriminal could chain incorrect configurations, weak passwords, and identity failures in order to compromise critical systems.
This solution, which has carried out nearly 330,000 penetration tests ('pentests') securely in production environments, provides precise remediation instructions, immediately verifies if the applied measures work, and enables the deployment of digital decoys ('honeypots') to detect if an AI-supported attacker has managed to infiltrate the network.
The capability of this technology has allowed the company to register a year-on-year increase of 120% in its recurring revenues.
Horizon3 has the FedRAMP* High security authorization from the United States Government and helps its clients align with regulatory frameworks such as DORA, NIS 2, NIST CSF 2.0, HIPAA, SOC 2, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), especially relevant in the European environment.
The firm has been recognized as the fastest-growing in the sector in North America, according to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and Fast Company listings.
After the latest capital increase, the company will allocate resources to accelerate its technological roadmap to establish a continuous learning cycle between its AI-based attack and defense systems, incorporating new autonomous tools capable of directly correcting the vulnerabilities that NodeZero identifies.
Key points of the funding round
The round, which received investment requests far exceeding the amount finally raised, has been co-led by the current partners NightDragon and NEA.
Seven new investors (Acrew, Blue Cloud Ventures, EDBI, Demeter Group, PSG, SAIC, and Sapphire) participated in the operation, along with five firms that were already part of the capital (Craft Ventures, Prosperity7 Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Ridge Ventures, and SignalFire).
As a result of the agreement, Dave DeWalt, founder and CEO of NightDragon and former CEO of FireEye and McAfee, and Morgan Kyauk, general manager of NightDragon, will join the board of directors of Horizon3.