Horizon3 raises $250M Series E at $2B+ valuation to lead the 'AI vs. AI' security era. Cyberattacks now move at the speed of AI, and traditional, human-paced defenses are struggling to keep up. As attackers increasingly wield AI of their own, the industry has entered what some call an "AI vs. AI" era - one in which defenders must fight machines with machines. Horizon3, an AI-native proactive security company based in San Francisco, is betting that the best defense is a good offense. Its flagship platform, NodeZero, is an autonomous penetration-testing tool that safely attacks an organization's own production environment. It shows exactly how an adversary would chain together misconfigurations, weak credentials, and identity gaps to compromise critical systems, offers fix guidance, and then instantly verifies that the remediation worked. As it tests, NodeZero can also plant honeypots to catch AI attackers already inside the network. That "attack, fix, verify" loop has driven 120% year-over-year ARR growth. Horizon3 now protects more than 7,000 organizations worldwide, including multinational banks, major healthcare networks, and four Fortune 10 enterprises. The company is FedRAMP High authorized and says it has safely executed 310,000 tests in production environments - the "data moat" it credits for its results. Discover more Stocks & Bonds Foreign Language Resources Horizon3 was founded in 2019 by CEO Snehal Antani and a team of technology and military veterans. Antani previously served as the first CTO of the U.S. military's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and before that as CTO and SVP at Splunk and CIO at GE Capital, beginning his career as a software engineer at IBM. The company announced a $250 million Series E co-led by existing investors NightDragon and NEA. The oversubscribed round drew seven new investors - including Acrew Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Singapore's EDBI, and SAIC - alongside returning backers such as Craft Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. The round values Horizon3 at more than $2 billion, roughly triple its $650 million valuation at Series D just over a year ago. As part of the deal, Dave DeWalt - founder of NightDragon and former CEO of FireEye and McAfee - and NightDragon managing director Morgan Kyauk will join Horizon3's board. The company plans to use the capital to scale its go-to-market operations, expand into Singapore, Australia, and across EMEA, and build a continuous learning loop between AI attackers and AI defenders, including new autonomous "blue-team" agents that remediate findings directly from NodeZero pentests. A crowded 'AI vs. AI' security market. Capital is pouring into cybersecurity as AI automates both attack and defense. In the offensive, autonomous-pentesting niche where Horizon3 operates, rivals include XBOW and Pentera. On the defensive side, security-automation firm Torq reached unicorn status on a $140 million round, while others race to embed AI across detection, endpoint, and identity. The common thread: as vulnerabilities multiply, the winners will be those that can not just find exploitable problems, but fix them at machine speed.

Everett company topped region's 2Q VC deals; seattle-area total down from year ago. * john stearns * 21 hrs ago. Everett fusion-energy company Helion recorded the largest fundraising deal in the second quarter in the greater Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area, according to the latest venture-capital report from Seattle-based PitchBook and the Washington, D.C.-based National Venture Capital Association. Helion in June announced a $465-million Series G investment round to accelerate commercial deployment of fusion, scale manufacturing capacity, and expand the company's ability to deliver clean electricity to customers. The latest deal valued the company at more than $15 billion. The Helion deal comprised almost a third of the $1.5 billion invested in greater Seattle area companies last quarter in about 78 deals. That was up from the roughly $1.2 billion raised in the first quarter in 77 deals, but far below the $2.3 billion from second quarter 2025 in about 100 deals, data showed. Nationally, $143.9 billion was invested last quarter in an estimated 5,039 deals, up from $85.8 billion in second quarter 2025, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor for 2Q 20206. Redmond-based Starcloud, which is developing space-based data centers, reported the greater Seattle area's second-largest deal in the second quarter, raising $170 million and taking its valuation past $1 billion. Seattle-based Xbow, which says it's an autonomous offensive security company redefining cyber defense for the AI era, raised $155 million in Series C financing in the quarter, rounding out the top three deals. Another space-industry company, Starfish Space, a satellite-servicing startup based in Tukwila, raised an estimated $115 million, the fourth-largest deal in the metro area last quarter. Seattle-based Gradial, an agentic AI company focused on transforming enterprise marketing operations, took the No. 5 spot in the quarter, raising $65 million. Other deals included Seattle-based Endurance Energy, which is developing subsea geothermal power, $54 million in a Series A, and Seattle-based Vedana Therapeutics, a biotechnology company developing next-generation therapies for migraine prevention, which reported a $46-million Series A. Commenting on the national VC landscape, Nizar Tarhuni, executive vice president of research and market intelligence at PitchBook, said in a statement, "SpaceX's IPO was the first of three potential trillion-dollar listings by US VC-backed companies in 2026, and what many want to view as the opening of an IPO window. The scale of these companies is their differentiating factor, though, largely boxing out the rest of VC from public markets." "The pipeline of companies in IPO registration remains low, and broad liquidity hasn't yet returned, leaving exit value very concentrated through Q2, and very likely through the rest of 2026," he continued Tarhuni. "The same concentration is showing up in how capital gets raised: nearly half of all H1 (first half 2026) capital commitments went to just three firms, and managers with track records pulled in more than nine out of every 10 dollars deployed into venture funds. LPs aren't spreading bets anymore - they're consolidating around track records and brands, a response to five years of thin distributions. This year's numbers will look like a recovery, but for most of the industry, it likely won't feel like one." In a separate statement, Bobby Franklin, president and CEO at NVCA, said, "The second quarter reinforced an emerging trend: capital is flowing back into American innovation with real force. Investment activity is picking up, fundraising is improving, and there are early signs the IPO market is beginning to reopen. AI continues to drive much of the market's momentum, even as investment and fundraising remain concentrated across a relatively small number of companies and funds. Healthier IPO and M&A markets will be critical to unlocking value, restoring liquidity, broadening access to capital, and supporting the next generation of American innovators across the country."

Accenture Ventures, DNX Ventures, Liberty Global, NVentures, Samsung, and SentinelOne Back Rising Demand for Continuous Offensive Security