HiddenLayer Raises $100M Series B, Still Won't Disclose a Valuation
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HiddenLayer Raises $100M Series B, Still Won't Disclose a Valuation
The AI-security startup says annual recurring revenue grew more than tenfold in a year, a figure that, like the round's price, appears nowhere in its own announcement.
HiddenLayer raised a $100 million Series B led by Delta-v Capital on Sept. 2, the company said, bringing its total funding to $150 million. Neither this round nor its 2023 Series A came with a disclosed valuation.
Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, M12 (Microsoft's venture arm) and Booz Allen Ventures joined the round, according to HiddenLayer. M12, Booz Allen Ventures and Ten Eleven Ventures also backed the company's $50 million Series A, which M12 and Moore Strategic Ventures led on Sept. 19, 2023.
A claimed tenfold jump in revenue
HiddenLayer told TechCrunch its annual recurring revenue is in the "tens of millions" of dollars and grew more than tenfold over the past year, with more than 90 percent of that growth coming from new customers rather than expansion of existing accounts. The company said it signed more than 50 new platform customers in that period, spanning financial services, government and defense buyers. None of those figures appears in an audited filing; they are HiddenLayer's own numbers, relayed to TechCrunch and repeated in the company's own release.
| Round | Size | Date | Lead investor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series A | $50 million | Sept. 19, 2023 | M12, Moore Strategic Ventures |
| Series B | $100 million | Sept. 2, 2026 | Delta-v Capital |
What Agentic Runtime Security actually does
HiddenLayer's platform watches AI systems while they run, rather than only scanning models before deployment, and the company said it holds 39 granted patents and 65 pending on the underlying detection methods. The Series B funds an expansion of that runtime product plus a new module called Agent Harness Security, aimed at AI coding agents specifically, which the company introduced alongside the funding announcement.
One customer it won't name
HiddenLayer said its customers include "a leading frontier model provider" that serves more than 700 million weekly users, without naming the company. It also cited contracts spanning securities, banking, insurance, accounting, airlines and the U.S. defense and intelligence communities, again without naming individual buyers.
A market where rivals get bought, not funded
HiddenLayer's chief competitive threat isn't only other startups: TechCrunch wrote that Cisco, Palo Alto Networks and Check Point have each shown a preference for acquiring AI-security capability rather than building it, the same pattern Palo Alto Networks followed when its chief executive had personally invested in the startup it later bought for a reported $500 million. Rivals Noma and Zenity have also raised sizable rounds of their own, TechCrunch reported, without disclosing the amounts for either.
HiddenLayer's pitch sits next to a wider argument about AI-agent risk. Anthropic's own chief executive, Dario Amodei, cited a breach in which AI agents were used to compromise Hugging Face when he called for an industry slowdown this month, the kind of incident HiddenLayer's new Agent Harness Security product is built to catch.
"We set out to pioneer trusted, secure use of AI for enterprises, long before most organizations saw the urgency we do today," HiddenLayer chief executive and co-founder Chris Sestito said in the funding announcement.
The company said the new money will deepen the Agentic Runtime Security platform and expand Agent Harness Security. It did not give a timeline for either.
Sources
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