HiddenLayer 融资 1 亿美元 B 轮，企业加码 AI 部署安全

当人工智能安全初创公司 HiddenLayer（https://www.hiddenlayer.com/）三年前完成其 5000 万美元 A 轮融资时，该领域的一个大问题是，这家初创公司所防护的 AI 威胁是否会以足够的数量出现，从而形成真正的市场。正如我以前的同事 Kyle Wiggers 所指出的（https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/hiddenlayer-raises-50m-for-its-ai-defending-cybersecurity-tools/），当时很难明确找出大规模 AI 攻击的真实例子。

情况变化得如此之快。现在，安全公司正争相构建不仅能监控代理（https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/insightfinder-raises-15m-to-help-companies-figure-out-where-ai-agents-go-wrong/），还能监控它们使用的工具和插件（https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/01/air-raises-50m-to-help-companies-vet-the-skills-and-add-ons-ai-agents-use/）的产品。虽然有关代理被利用的新闻仍然不多，但在生产中代理失控的风险仍然真实存在（https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/05/07/prompts-become-shells-rce-vulnerabilities-ai-agent-frameworks/?utm_source=chatgpt.com）。因此，防止这种情况发生的工具市场迅速发展：Gartner 预测（https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-08-26-gartner-forecasts-the-market-for-securing-ai-will-reach-almost-5-billion-in-2027?utm_source=chatgpt.com），今年公司将在用于保护 AI 工具的产品上花费 28.3 亿美元，比 2025 年增长 83%，并预计明年的支出将达到近 47.8 亿美元。

HiddenLayer 开发了用于保护 AI 模型、代理和工作流免受对抗性攻击、漏洞和恶意代码注入的工具，从而能够很好地利用这种变化。其联合创始人兼 CEO Chris Sestito 告诉 TechCrunch，这家初创公司的年经常性收入在过去一年增长了 10 倍以上。他拒绝给出具体数字，但表示 ARR 现在达到了“数千万美元”，而且超过 90% 的增长来自去年新客户的签约。

金融服务和大型科技公司正在构建人工智能产品，目前是该公司的最大垂直领域，它还与国防部和情报部门签订了合同。其一位客户显然是一家“领先的前沿模型提供商”，拥有“超过7亿周活跃用户”，听起来像是OpenAI或Anthropic。

为了充分利用这一势头，该初创公司现在在B轮融资中筹集了1亿美元，由Delta-v Capital领投，Ten Eleven Ventures、摩根士丹利、微软的M12、Booz Allen Hamilton等也参与了此次融资。

这家总部位于奥斯汀的初创公司大体上仍然销售2023年所销售的产品，但Sestito告诉TechCrunch，他们最大的变化是将现有产品——发现、运行时保护、攻击模拟和供应链安全——扩展到应对提示注入、代理操作和恶意工具使用。

“推理仍然是推理。所以无论是传统机器学习模型，还是生成式人工智能，无论是代理工作流，我们的很多技术仍然适用。因此，我们真的不需要转型，但我们需要扩大我们的范围……从传统建模到生成式人工智能，再到代理化，”他说。

Sestito强调，随着人工智能部署在企业中越来越普遍，运行时安全尤其成为优先事项，并将其比作传统的端点检测与响应（EDR）解决方案，但专门针对人工智能。

公司的新产品反映了这一转变，Sestito强调了攻击者利用开源模型的新机会。“我们解析并扫描大约50种不同的人工智能文件框架，以确保，尤其是在开源、开放权重模型的情况下，你正在使用的工具确实是你认为的那个，也是它所声称的那个。我们关注的是那些声称是某种模型却实际上是另一种模型的情况——模型内部隐藏模型，”他说。

该初创公司表示，新的1亿美元将帮助其在该方向上发展，同时更多地关注销售和分销，并继续扩展工程和研究。它还计划扩展到欧洲和EMEA地区。

HiddenLayer 可能会发现自己需要动用那笔战争基金来获得更多资金。大型网络安全公司，如思科：https://blogs.cisco.com/news/fortifying-the-future-of-security-for-ai-cisco-announces-intent-to-acquire-robust-intelligence、Palo Alto Networks：https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/palo-alto-networks-announces-intent-to-acquire-protect-ai-a-game-changing-security-for-ai-company-302439638.html 和 Check Point：https://www.checkpoint.com/press-releases/check-point-acquires-lakera-to-deliver-end-to-end-ai-security-for-enterprises/ 通常更倾向于购买而非构建这类技术，而初创公司如 Noma：https://www.noma.security/blog/noma-security-raises-100m-to-drive-adoption-of-ai-agent-security?utm_source=chatgpt.com 和 Zenity：https://www.securityweek.com/zenity-raises-125-million-in-series-c-funding/?utm_source=chatgpt.com 则各自筹集了超过 1 亿美元以进入该领域的相关或重叠领域。

Sestito 承认，他公司提供的部分 AI 安全产品最终可能会被打包进入微软、OpenAI 和 AWS 等公司构建的平台中。然而，他预计 AI 基础设施将更多地向发现、身份和策略控制等治理功能发展，而不是他公司所构建的那类工具。

目前，他表示 HiddenLayer 的任务是“与人工智能一同纵向扩展”，并最终横向扩展到越来越依赖 AI 的网络安全领域。这是一个雄心勃勃的目标，但这家初创公司首先必须证明它能够将自身的领先优势转化为持久的业务，然后其他行业公司才能赶上。

当您通过我们文章中的链接购买时，我们可能会获得少量佣金：https://techcrunch.com/techcrunch-affiliate-monetization-standards/。这并不影响我们的编辑独立性。

Ram 是一名财经和科技记者兼编辑。他在路透社和 Acuris Global 报道过北美和欧洲的并购、股票、监管新闻及债券市场，也曾撰写关于旅行、旅游、娱乐和书籍的文章。

您可以通过发送电子邮件至 ram.iyer@techcrunch.com：mailto:ram.iyer@techcrunch.com 联系或验证 Ram 的外部联系。

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When AI security startup HiddenLayer：https://www.hiddenlayer.com/ raised its $50 million Series A three years ago, one of the big questions in the space was whether the AI threats the startup was protecting against would manifest in enough quantity to make for a real market. As my former colleague Kyle Wiggers noted：https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/hiddenlayer-raises-50m-for-its-ai-defending-cybersecurity-tools/ at the time, it was difficult to pin down real examples of attacks against AI at scale.

How quickly things have changed. Security companies are now scrambling to build products that can monitor not just agents：https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/insightfinder-raises-15m-to-help-companies-figure-out-where-ai-agents-go-wrong/ but also the tools and add-ons they use：https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/01/air-raises-50m-to-help-companies-vet-the-skills-and-add-ons-ai-agents-use/. While there still aren’t many headlines about agents being exploited, the risk of agents going haywire during production is nevertheless real：https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/05/07/prompts-become-shells-rce-vulnerabilities-ai-agent-frameworks/?utm_source=chatgpt.com. And so the market for tools to prevent that from happening has exploded: Gartner estimates：https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-08-26-gartner-forecasts-the-market-for-securing-ai-will-reach-almost-5-billion-in-2027?utm_source=chatgpt.com companies will spend $2.83 billion this year on products meant to secure AI tools, 83% more than 2025, and expects spending to reach nearly $4.78 billion next year.

HiddenLayer, which makes tools to protect AI models, agents and workflows from adversarial attacks, vulnerabilities and malicious code injections, has been able to take good advantage of that shift. Its co-founder and CEO, Chris Sestito, tells TechCrunch that the startup’s annual recurring revenue grew more than 10x over the past year. He declined to give an exact number, but said ARR is now in the “tens of millions” of dollars, and over 90% of that growth was driven by new customers signing in the past year.

Financial services and large tech companies building AI products are currently the company’s largest verticals, and it also has contracts with the Department of Defense and intelligence community. One of its customers is apparently a “leading frontier model provider” with “more than 700 million weekly users,” which sounds like OpenAI or Anthropic to me.

To make the most of that momentum, the startup has now raised $100 million in a Series B funding round that was led by Delta-v Capital, with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft’s M12, Booz Allen Hamilton, and others.

The Austin-based startup broadly still sells what it used to in 2023, but Sestito told TechCrunch that the biggest change it’s had to make was to extend its existing products — discovery, runtime protection, attack simulation, and supply chain security — to address prompt injection, agent manipulation and malicious tool use.

“Inference is still inference. So whether it’s on a traditional machine learning model, whether it’s Gen AI, whether it’s an agentic work stream, a lot of our technology still applied. So really, we haven’t had to pivot, but we’ve had to grow our scope … from traditional modeling to Gen AI to agentic,” he said.

Sestito stressed that runtime security has especially become a priority as AI deployments grow common across businesses, and likened it to traditional endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, but specifically for AI.

The company’s new products reflect that shift, and Sestito highlighted a new opportunity for attackers in exploiting open-source models. “We parse and scan about 50 different AI file frameworks to make sure that, especially in the case of open-source, open-weight models, that the tool you’re working with is the one you believe it to be, and it’s the one it’s purporting to be. We’re looking at things like models purporting to be one thing, but they’re another — hidden models inside of models,” he said.

The startup says the new $100 million is going to help it build in that direction, though with more of a focus on sales and distribution, while continuing to expand its engineering and research. It also plans to expand into Europe and EMEA.

HiddenLayer may find itself tapping that warchest for more, though. Large cybersecurity companies, like Cisco：https://blogs.cisco.com/news/fortifying-the-future-of-security-for-ai-cisco-announces-intent-to-acquire-robust-intelligence, Palo Alto Networks：https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/palo-alto-networks-announces-intent-to-acquire-protect-ai-a-game-changing-security-for-ai-company-302439638.html and Check Point：https://www.checkpoint.com/press-releases/check-point-acquires-lakera-to-deliver-end-to-end-ai-security-for-enterprises/ often prefer to buy rather than build this sort of tech, while startups like Noma：https://www.noma.security/blog/noma-security-raises-100m-to-drive-adoption-of-ai-agent-security?utm_source=chatgpt.com and Zenity：https://www.securityweek.com/zenity-raises-125-million-in-series-c-funding/?utm_source=chatgpt.com have raised over $100 million each to take on adjacent or overlapping areas of this space.

Sestito acknowledged that some parts of the AI security products his company offers could eventually be bundled into the platforms built by companies such as Microsoft, OpenAI and AWS. However, he expects AI infrastructure will grow towards governance features such as discovery, identity and policy controls, rather than the kind of tools that his company builds.

For now, he says HiddenLayer’s job is to “scale vertically alongside artificial intelligence,” and eventually, expand horizontally into parts of cybersecurity that increasingly depend on AI. That’s an ambitious goal, but the startup first has to prove it can turn its head start into an enduring business before the rest of the industry catches up.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission：https://techcrunch.com/techcrunch-affiliate-monetization-standards/. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Ram is a financial and tech reporter and editor. He covered North American and European M&A, equity, regulatory news and debt markets at Reuters and Acuris Global, and has also written about travel, tourism, entertainment and books.

You can contact or verify outreach from Ram by emailing ram.iyer@techcrunch.com：mailto:ram.iyer@techcrunch.com.

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