HiddenLayer, an Austin-based AI security company, announced on September 2, 2026 that it has raised a $100 million Series B round led by Delta-v Capital, with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, and Booz Allen Ventures. The company said it will use the funding to deepen its enterprise platform, including its Agentic Runtime Security capabilities and a new product for securing AI coding agents.
The company’s announcement describes HiddenLayer as a provider of security for agentic, generative, and predictive AI applications. The raise arrives as enterprises work to secure an expanding AI attack surface that now stretches from foundation models to autonomous agents writing and shipping code on their behalf, according to the company.
Platform Focus and New Coding-Agent Product
HiddenLayer said the new capital will support three areas where it sees enterprises as most exposed. The first is Agentic Runtime Security, which gives organizations visibility into how their AI agents behave in production and is designed to flag and stop manipulation, tool misuse, and unauthorized actions as they happen. The second is Agent Harness Security, a new solution that extends the platform’s Runtime Security module to secure AI coding agents at runtime as enterprises adopt autonomous coding agents that write, review, and ship code with less human oversight than traditional development tools.
“We set out to pioneer trusted, secure use of AI for enterprises, long before most organizations saw the urgency we do today. This funding lets us keep growing the purpose-built team and platform required to meet that moment as agentic AI becomes core to how enterprises operate,” said Chris Sestito, CEO and Co-Founder of HiddenLayer.
The company framed its approach around runtime protection, arguing that AI cannot be made trustworthy through design-time principles alone and that trust has to be continuously tested and proven at runtime.
Reported Growth Over the Past Year
HiddenLayer reported that its annual recurring revenue grew more than 10x over the past year and that it signed more than 50 new platform customers. Those customers span securities brokerage, banking, insurance, accounting, government, technology, IT services, pharmaceuticals, airlines, and the US defense and intelligence communities, the company said. Internationally, it reported adding one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies along with several premium automotive brands and food and beverage providers. HiddenLayer also said it supports a leading frontier model provider in securing more than 700 million weekly users.
Investors pointed to that traction in statements accompanying the round. Dan Williams, Partner at Delta-v Capital, said traditional security tools were built for code and infrastructure rather than for models that can be poisoned, hijacked, or manipulated through their own inputs, and said HiddenLayer built its platform to secure AI across its full lifecycle. Mark Hatfield, Co-Founder and Partner at Ten Eleven Ventures, said HiddenLayer’s growth across defense, financial services, and sensitive AI deployments shows security teams have concluded that AI needs its own category of protection. Zheng Wang, Head of Strategic Investments at Morgan Stanley, described HiddenLayer’s end-to-end platform for compliant AI adoption as an important contribution to addressing the market need.
Research Team and Patent Portfolio
The company credited its growth in part to its research organization. HiddenLayer said its researchers hold 39 granted patents and 65 pending patents covering adversarial detection, model protection, and AI threat analysis. The team developed what the company describes as the first comprehensive Adversarial Prompt Engineering (APE) Taxonomy and reports identifying dozens of vulnerabilities across the AI ecosystem, from foundation models to supporting tools and infrastructure. Its researchers also contribute to community work with CISA/JCDC, MITRE, NIST, OWASP, and OpenSSF, focused on red teaming methodologies and AI governance discussions.
The funding announcement cites findings from HiddenLayer’s 2026 AI Threat Landscape Report, which states that 96% of organizations consider AI critical to their core operations while nearly a third cannot say with certainty whether they have experienced an AI-related breach.
Leadership and Expansion Plans
HiddenLayer said it recently named Mike Gesnaldo as Chief Revenue Officer and plans further hires as it deepens channel relationships, keeps pace with enterprise customer demand, and expands into international markets, beginning with Europe and the wider EMEA region. Gesnaldo’s appointment was announced on August 12, 2026; he previously built go-to-market organizations at CrowdStrike, Tanium, and Dazz.
The Series B follows a period of product expansion for the company. On August 3, 2026, HiddenLayer launched Agent Harness Security as a stand-alone solution that integrates into each coding agent’s native hook surface to detect and stop prompt injection, sensitive data exposure, and unsafe command execution as they occur. In March 2026, the company introduced agentic capabilities for its AI Runtime Security module, adding runtime visibility, investigation and threat hunting, and detection and enforcement for autonomous AI workloads. HiddenLayer was also selected in August 2026 to support the US Department of Energy’s $60 million Prometheus initiative, contributing AI security expertise to a national-laboratory collaboration applying AI to nuclear energy challenges.
