HiddenLayer, an Austin, Texas-based startup that builds security tools for artificial intelligence systems, has raised $100 million in a Series B funding round led by Delta-v Capital, with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft's M12 fund and Booz Allen Ventures. The round brings HiddenLayer's total funding to more than $155 million since it was founded in 2022.
The company said annual recurring revenue grew more than tenfold over the past year, with more than 90% of that growth coming from new customer acquisitions rather than expansion within existing accounts. HiddenLayer signed more than 50 new platform customers over the period, spanning securities brokerage, banking, insurance, accounting, government, technology, IT services, pharmaceuticals, airlines and the US defense and intelligence communities — a client list that also includes what the company described as a "leading frontier model provider" serving more than 700 million weekly users.
From Model Scanning to Agent Security
HiddenLayer started by helping enterprises discover and scan AI models for vulnerabilities and supply-chain risks. The new funding will go toward extending that work into runtime protection for AI agents — systems capable of taking autonomous actions rather than simply generating text — including a new Agent Harness Security product aimed at securing AI coding agents as companies adopt them across their engineering stacks.
We haven't had to pivot, but we've had to grow our scope … from traditional modeling to GenAI to agentic.
Chris Sestito, co-founder and CEO, HiddenLayer
Sestito, who co-founded HiddenLayer in 2022, said the company "set out to pioneer trusted, secure use of AI for enterprises, long before most organizations saw the urgency" — an early bet that has positioned it as enterprises increasingly treat AI-specific risk as a distinct budget line from traditional cybersecurity spending. The company plans to use the new capital to expand sales and distribution, deepen engineering and research investment, and establish a presence in Europe.
The round comes amid a broader rush among enterprises to secure AI systems as they move from pilot projects into production, a shift that has spawned a crowded field of AI-security startups competing for the same corporate budgets. HiddenLayer's investor roster now includes several strategic backers with direct exposure to that shift: Microsoft's M12 fund and Morgan Stanley both participated in the round, alongside Booz Allen Ventures, whose parent consults extensively for the federal government on AI adoption. The company has not disclosed a valuation for the round.
