Pomegra
Austin-based HiddenLayer closed a $100M Series B led by Delta-v Capital to guard enterprise agentic and generative AI deployments against adversarial attacks, supply chain risks, and runtime threats.
Key Takeaways:
- Delta-v Capital led the $100M round; Ten Eleven Ventures, Microsoft M12, Morgan Stanley, and Booz Allen Hamilton also participated.
- HiddenLayer's annual recurring revenue grew more than 10x over 12 months, with 50+ net-new enterprise customers added.
- Total funding now exceeds $155M; the company did not disclose a valuation at close.
Lead
HiddenLayer, the Austin, Texas AI security company founded in 2022, announced a $100 million Series B on September 2, 2026, bringing its total capital raised above $155 million. The round was led by Delta-v Capital, with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, Microsoft's M12, Morgan Stanley, and Booz Allen Hamilton. The company said funds will go toward expanding its enterprise platform, deepening channel relationships, and entering international markets.
What Does HiddenLayer Actually Do?
HiddenLayer builds security tooling specifically for AI systems - a narrower and more technical target than general cybersecurity. Its platform covers the full AI lifecycle: discovery, AI supply chain security, attack simulation, and runtime protection for agentic, generative, and predictive AI applications.
The product category is sometimes called AI runtime security, and it addresses threats that traditional endpoint or network security tools are not designed to catch. Adversarial inputs can manipulate model outputs; poisoned training data can corrupt model behavior before deployment; agent architectures introduce new attack surfaces as AI systems gain the ability to take autonomous actions. HiddenLayer's platform is built to intercept all three.
CEO Chris Sestito has positioned the company as infrastructure-layer protection rather than a point solution bolted onto existing stacks. The distinction matters: enterprises running large model deployments need protection that operates at inference time, not just during model training or at the perimeter.
Why Is This Round Happening Now?
Enterprise AI adoption has accelerated sharply since late 2024, and so has attacker interest in AI-specific exploits. Agentic AI - where models take multi-step actions, call APIs, and make decisions without constant human input - has expanded the attack surface faster than most security teams anticipated. A compromised agent operating inside a banking or healthcare environment carries meaningfully different risk than a compromised chatbot.
HiddenLayer's customer base reflects where that risk is concentrated. New customers over the past year came from banking, insurance, pharma, airlines, and the US defense and intelligence communities - sectors where AI failure modes have direct operational or regulatory consequences.
The 10x ARR growth in 12 months is the data point that justifies a $100M raise at this stage. It signals the market is pulling the product, not just acknowledging the concept.
How Does the Investor Lineup Read?
Delta-v Capital leading this round is a straightforward signal: the firm focuses on cybersecurity and has been tracking AI-specific threats for several years. Ten Eleven Ventures carries a similar thesis.
The presence of Microsoft M12 deserves scrutiny. Microsoft has a direct stake in enterprise AI adoption through Azure and its own AI products, and a parallel interest in ensuring those deployments are secure. An investment in HiddenLayer could reflect genuine alignment on the security gap, or it could reflect a desire to keep tabs on a company whose technology could become either a partner or a competitive complication. The round structure gives no clear answer.
Morgan Stanley and Booz Allen Hamilton are the less surprising backers. The former provides financial sector credibility; the latter connects HiddenLayer directly to its largest near-term customer vertical - defense and intelligence.
What Does This Imply About the Previous Round?
HiddenLayer raised a $50M Series A in 2023. A $100M Series B at undisclosed valuation, arriving roughly three years later with 10x revenue growth, implies the A-round investors are sitting on a meaningful markup. It also implies the company still sees a path to growth large enough to justify the new dilution - international expansion and deeper enterprise platform development are the stated uses.
Secondary market data has placed the post-money valuation near $387 million, though the company has not confirmed any figure.
Outlook
HiddenLayer is betting that AI security becomes a mandatory enterprise budget line rather than an optional add-on - and the funding trajectory suggests institutional investors share that view. The immediate focus is international expansion and platform depth around agentic use cases, where demand is growing fastest. The test over the next 18 months is whether the company can convert its ARR momentum into durable contracts at scale, particularly in the defense sector, before larger incumbents with broader platforms move to close the gap.
