HiddenLayer Raises $100M as Enterprise AI Security Spending Accelerates

HiddenLayer has raised a $100 million Series B led by Delta-v Capital, with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft’s M12, Booz Allen Hamilton and others. The round follows a $50 million Series A three years earlier, when the scale of enterprise AI threats was still harder to pin down. The new raise signals stronger investor conviction that AI security is becoming a core enterprise need.

Security teams are moving beyond monitoring AI agents alone to watching the tools, add-ons and workflows those agents use. The article notes that even without many public headlines about exploited agents, production risks such as prompt injection, agent manipulation and malicious tool use are shaping buyer urgency. Gartner estimates companies will spend $2.83 billion this year on products to secure AI tools, up 83% from 2025, and expects spending to reach nearly $4.78 billion next year.

HiddenLayer makes tools designed to protect AI models, agents and workflows from adversarial attacks, vulnerabilities and malicious code injections. Its products include discovery, runtime protection, attack simulation and supply chain security, with expanded coverage for generative AI and agentic work streams. CEO Chris Sestito described runtime security as a priority as AI deployments become more common across businesses.

Sestito told TechCrunch that HiddenLayer’s annual recurring revenue grew more than 10x over the past year and is now in the “tens of millions” of dollars, though he declined to provide an exact figure. Financial services and large tech companies building AI products are currently the company’s largest verticals, and HiddenLayer also has contracts with the Department of Defense and intelligence community. The startup says the new capital will support sales and distribution, continued engineering and research expansion, and growth into Europe and EMEA.

HiddenLayer is operating in a crowded and fast-moving cybersecurity category where large security companies often buy emerging technology and startups are racing into adjacent areas. Sestito acknowledged that some AI security features could eventually be bundled into platforms from major AI and cloud providers. For now, the company’s challenge is to turn its early position into a durable business as enterprise AI security becomes a broader market priority.