HiddenLayer Raises $100M Series B as AI-Security ARR Jumps 10x
TL;DR
- Delta-v Capital led, with Microsoft M12, Booz Allen Ventures, Ten Eleven Ventures, and Morgan Stanley all participating, placing hyperscaler, defense prime, and traditional finance capital behind the same platform.
- ARR grew more than 10x in 12 months, driven by 50-plus net-new customers across banking, insurance, pharma, airlines, and US defense and intelligence communities.
- DOE Prometheus and Missile Defense Agency SHIELD contracts add federally validated revenue streams to HiddenLayer's commercial ARR, validating the platform across two distinct government buyer pools.
HiddenLayer, an Austin-based AI security startup, closed a $100 million Series B led by Delta-v Capital, with Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft's M12 and Booz Allen Hamilton participating, TechCrunch reported.
Co-founder and CEO Chris Sestito told TechCrunch that annual recurring revenue grew more than 10x over the past year into the "tens of millions," with over 90% of that growth coming from new customers. One of them is described as a "leading frontier model provider" with "more than 700 million weekly users."
Sestito's pitch is that AI security keeps looking like the same problem in wider clothes. "Inference is still inference," he said. "So whether it's on a traditional machine learning model, whether it's Gen AI, whether it's an agentic work stream, a lot of our technology still applied." The platform spans discovery, runtime protection, attack simulation and supply-chain security, aimed at prompt injection, agent manipulation and malicious tool use.
The supply-chain piece is where the deadpan detail lands. "We parse and scan about 50 different AI file frameworks to make sure that, especially in the case of open-source, open-weight models, that the tool you're working with is the one you believe it to be, and it's the one it's purporting to be," Sestito said. He framed the threat as "hidden models inside of models."
Named customer segments include financial services, large tech companies building AI products, the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. TechCrunch does not name any specific enterprise buyer or disclose the round's valuation. HiddenLayer plans to put the capital toward sales, engineering and EMEA expansion. It lands on a busy day for AI-funding coverage on our tracker and joins a run of AI-security stories alongside CrowdStrike's SafeMind debut and OpenAI's disclosure that Astra crossed a 'critical' cyber threshold.
What others are reporting
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PR Newswire Read →
Official press release with the complete investor roster, 700M-plus weekly-user scale claim for a single customer, APE Taxonomy research contribution, and CRO hire details.
HiddenLayer built a platform from the ground up to secure AI across its full lifecycle, from the model at its core to the agentic systems being layered on top.
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Unite.AI Read →
Editorial emphasizing the new Agent Harness Security product and the 39-patent IP portfolio, with specific callouts to HiddenLayer's roles in CISA, MITRE, NIST, and OWASP standards bodies.
AI cannot be made trustworthy through design-time principles alone and that trust has to be continuously tested and proven at runtime.
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CryptoBriefing Read →
Leads with the government-validation angle, naming the DOE's $60M Prometheus initiative and Missile Defense Agency SHIELD, and provides an estimated 170-178 employee headcount as an operational scale signal.
HiddenLayer's approach doesn't require access to raw training data or model weights.
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CIO Influence Read →
Frames runtime AI security as mandatory enterprise infrastructure rather than an add-on, anchored by a quote from Ten Eleven Ventures not surfaced in other coverage.
AI needs its own category of protection.
Originally reported by techcrunch.com
Read the original article →Original headline: HiddenLayer Closes $100M Series B Led by Delta-v Capital as AI-Security ARR Grows 10x