Startup profile · funding coverage
Dreadnode funding, valuation and investors
Offensive AI security firm developing red-team tools and adversarial testing workflows for AI systems and autonomous agents.
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Funding, valuation & investors
Answer-first snapshotLatest funding
Series A
$14M · February 25, 2025
Latest known valuation
Not publicly disclosed
Total disclosed equity funding
$14M
Excludes debt, grants, acquisitions, secondaries, and IPO proceeds.
Current status
private
series a
Investors in latest funding
Lead: Decibel
Other: Next Frontier Capital , In-Q-Tel , Sands Capital , Indie.vc
Overview
Dreadnode was founded in 2023 by offensive-security researchers including Will Pearce and Nick Landers. It builds AI security testing tools and services to identify weaknesses in language models, agent integrations, tool permissions and emerging autonomous workflows before or during enterprise deployment.
Public products and initiatives include its offensive platform and AI red-teaming research; security testing aims to uncover jailbreaks, prompt injection and unsafe tool execution rather than to directly guarantee safe real-time operation. Dreadnode publicly announced a $14M Series A on February 25, 2025 led by Decibel, with Next Frontier Capital, In-Q-Tel, Sands Capital and indie.vc.
Publicly named early supporters do not establish separate dated priced rounds. On November 3, 2026 CrowdStrike announced its agreement to acquire Dreadnode to expand adversarial AI agent security capabilities. Media reported approximately $95M consideration, but terms were not officially disclosed and the acquisition remained pending. Its current executive management should not be conflated with its cofounders.
Why Dreadnode is interesting
Dreadnode occupies the predeployment testing layer in AI agent security, complementing CrowdStrike's planned Fiddler observability acquisition. Its $14M February 2025 Series A was followed by a November 2026 announced CrowdStrike acquisition agreement that the WSJ valued at roughly $95M, although transaction consideration is undisclosed by the buyer and the deal had not closed.
Product & use cases
Offensive AI agent security and adversarial assurance: controlled attack simulation, prompt injection and jailbreak tests, assessment of agent-to-tool privilege paths, red-team campaigns and risk reports for development and security teams.
- Testing AI agents' tool-use permissions and exposure to prompt injection
- Adversarial evaluations of LLM application security before release
- Security regression testing after agent, model and prompt changes
- Producing evidence for AI threat-model reviews, red-team exercises and risk governance
Key facts
- Feb 25, 2025: $14M Series A led by Decibel, with Next Frontier, In-Q-Tel, Sands Capital and indie.vc.
- Nov 3, 2026: CrowdStrike agreement to acquire; WSJ reported ~$95M, not buyer-confirmed and not yet closed.
- Product focus: AI agent red teaming, adversarial security research and predeployment evaluations.
- No separate earlier priced financing with an independently verifiable date and amount was identified.
Funding history (newest first)
Series A
2025-02-25 $14M- Decibel (lead)
- Next Frontier Capital (participant)
- In-Q-Tel (participant)
- Sands Capital (participant)
- Indie.vc (participant)
Source: Read source · dreadnode.io
Investors in our directory
Funds linked from Dreadnode's profile — open a fund page for stage focus and related deal articles.
Competitive landscape
Edge: Offensive-security research focus and testing capability for complex agent workflows, rather than general purpose LLM chat evaluation. Product effectiveness depends on attack coverage, ability to reproduce failures, realistic tool permissions and integration into engineering release pipelines.
Predeployment attack testing does not eliminate the need for ongoing runtime protection or incident observability. Buyers should test attack families, reproducibility, integration with CI, privileged actions, false positives, and the cost of rerunning tests every time a model or agent workflow changes.
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Promptfoo direct
Developer-focused open-source LLM and agent red teaming, with commercial security.
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Mindgard direct
AI red teaming and security validation.
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Giskard direct
Automated LLM application testing and red teaming.
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PyRIT alternative
Microsoft's open-source AI red-teaming orchestration framework.
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garak alternative
Open-source vulnerability scanner for large language models.
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Noma Security adjacent
Enterprise AI posture, discovery and runtime security.
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HiddenLayer adjacent
AI asset discovery and model/agent runtime defense.
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Lakera adjacent
Prompt injection detection and runtime LLM application guardrails.
Industries
Market / IPO context
Editorial / static context — not a live quote.
FAQs about Dreadnode
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