HiddenLayer Secures $100 Million and Decuples Its Revenue

HiddenLayer closes a $100 million Series B round and claims an annual recurring revenue multiplied by more than ten in a year. The publisher is expanding its defenses to cover prompt injection and agent manipulation, while Gartner anticipates up to $4.78 billion in spending on AI tool security next year.

Rising Spending and Potential Integration by Platforms

Major cybersecurity players, such as Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, and Check Point, often prefer acquiring AI security technologies rather than developing them in-house. Chris Sestito, CEO of HiddenLayer, believes that certain AI security features could eventually be integrated into platforms from Microsoft, OpenAI, or AWS, while the AI infrastructure would evolve towards governance functions such as discovery, identity, and policy controls. In related fields, startups Noma and Zenity have each raised over $100 million. According to Gartner, companies are expected to spend $2.83 billion this year to secure their AI tools, which is 83% more than in 2025, and nearly $4.78 billion next year.

Expanded Products and Real-Time Priority

HiddenLayer offers solutions designed to ensure the security of AI models, agents, and workflows against adversarial attacks, vulnerabilities, and attempts at malicious code injection. The company has developed its discovery, real-time defense, attack simulation, and supply chain security services to address issues such as prompt injection, agent manipulation, or the use of malicious tools. Chris Sestito notes that principles related to inference continue to apply to both traditional models and generative AI or workflows involving agents, leading to an expansion of the scope rather than a strategic pivot. Real-time security is now a priority as AI deployments become widespread, and Sestito compares this approach to that of EDR solutions, but applied to AI. HiddenLayer analyzes around 50 AI file formats to verify the authenticity of artifacts, particularly to detect hidden models or those masquerading as others, a crucial issue for open-source and open-weight models.

ARR Growth and Customer Profiles

Chris Sestito indicates that HiddenLayer's annual recurring revenue has increased by more than tenfold in a year and now stands in the tens of millions of dollars. Over 90% of this growth is attributed to customers acquired in the past twelve months. The major sectors in which the company operates include finance and large tech companies engaged in AI product development. HiddenLayer also counts the Department of Defense and the intelligence community among its clients. One of its clients is described as a leading model provider with over 700 million weekly users.

Funding, Investors, and Roadmap

HiddenLayer 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 other investors. Based in Austin, the company plans to use these funds to bolster its sales and distribution, continue expanding its engineering and research team, and extend its reach in Europe and the EMEA region. HiddenLayer also continues to market the offering launched in 2023.

From Initial Skepticism to the Rise of Dedicated Tools

Three years ago, HiddenLayer raised $50 million in a context where large-scale AI attacks were difficult to identify concretely. Since then, cybersecurity companies have been developing solutions to monitor agents, tools, and plugins. Highly publicized incidents remain rare, but the risk of losing control of agents in production is considered real, fueling demand for specialized prevention tools.