Frenos Closes $1.52M Advancing OT Security's First AI Penetration Testing Platform

Funding from leading industrial investors accelerates mission to deliver cyber resilience for high-stake critical infrastructure and defense environments with continuously validated OT security posture

FULTON, Md., July 28, 2026 – AI-native OT security pioneer Frenos today announced a $1.52 million seed extension round led by leading industrial investors Momenta, Exposition Ventures, and joined by Riptide Ventures, bringing the company's total funding to $6.4 million. Frenos will use the capital to grow its customer success team, supporting a rapidly expanding customer base across critical infrastructure enterprises and defense, and to expand its AI R&D team.

That investment is already producing results: alongside the round, Frenos is launching SAIRA Co-Work, evolving its reasoning engine into a persistent OT security co-worker that reasons over live digital twin data and guides users through complex investigations with evidence-based insights. Research will continue toward a next-generation foundation model for long-context reasoning and autonomous engineering workflows, a core component of the company's future AI-powered simulated penetration testing platform.

The OT security market is projected to grow from $27.4 billion in 2026 to $58.9 billion by 2031, according to MarketsandMarkets, as ransomware, industrial espionage, and cyber-physical threats to industrial control systems accelerate alongside IT/OT convergence. The threat is no longer theoretical: in 2026, Google's Threat Intelligence Group reported the first known zero-day exploit developed with AI and warned that AI tools are lowering the barrier for adversaries to reverse-engineer applications and build sophisticated exploits. As AI increases the speed and sophistication of cyberattacks, organizations that lack visibility into how adversaries could move through their environments risk falling behind.

"Every OT operator has a vulnerability list a mile long. Almost none of it matters. What matters is the handful an adversary can actually exploit given the real conditions in your network: what's reachable, what's misconfigured, what chains together. I spent over a decade defending these environments and never had a tool that could tell me that. So we built one," said Brian Proctor, founder and CEO of Frenos. "This funding puts more muscle behind both sides of that promise: hands-on customer success for the operators who depend on us, and deeper AI research behind SAIRA so it keeps finding the paths a real attacker would take."

The Frenos Platform closes that gap by continuously validating OT security posture. Built on a digital twin of the customer's network and powered by SAIRA, Frenos' AI reasoning agent, the platform runs fully simulated penetration tests that mimic real adversary behavior. It validates attack paths, chains exploits and tactics the way an attacker would, and prioritizes the risks that matter most, all with no hardware, no scanning, and no downtime.

"Most OT security testing today tells you what's vulnerable, not what's defensible. The question that matters is what path takes an attacker from an exposed HMI to a process they can actually disrupt, and almost nobody is testing for that. Frenos is one of the only teams I've seen build a platform that thinks in those terms without putting production at risk to do it. That's a rare combination, and it's why I joined the advisory board," said Robert M. Lee, advisory board member at Frenos and co-founder and CEO of Dragos.

This round follows a year of significant momentum for Frenos. Annual recurring revenue is up more than 10x since the start of 2025, growing 215 percent in the first half of 2026 after growing 225 percent the year before. Sales pipeline is up 2.7x year over year, with more new pipeline generated in the first half of 2026 than in all of 2025 combined. Average deal size is up 3.2x as Frenos moves upmarket into enterprise and critical infrastructure accounts. The platform's impact is just as measurable: in one customer environment, SAIRA analyzed more than 12,000 OT vulnerability findings and surfaced the eight that were actually exploitable given the network's real conditions, cutting remediation noise by 99.9 percent.

“OT security requires a different approach than traditional IT security. Frenos is helping industrial operators continuously validate cyber resilience without putting production at risk. That's exactly the kind of industrial innovation we look for at Momenta,” said Michael Dolbec, Managing Partner, Momenta.

“Industrial leaders know that OT cyber resilience is essential for protecting revenue and uptime, particularly as AI accelerates both automation and attack sophistication,” said Carlos Furlotti, Principal, Exposition Ventures. “Traditional IT security tools fail in industrial settings, but Frenos delivers the precise, safe visibility operators need to manage risk without threatening production. The team is uniquely poised to transform OT security, and we are proud to back them.”

For more insight on what this funding means for Frenos and the industry, visit this blog by Momenta. To learn more about the Frenos Adversary Intelligence Engine and reduce the risk of cyber incidents that halt industrial operations, visit https://frenos.io/adversary-intelligence-engine-frenos.

About Frenos

Frenos is the industry’s first fully simulated AI penetration testing platform, combining digital twin technology with an AI reasoning agent that thinks like an adversary to reveal every attack path in your OT environment, risk-free. Frenos transforms how operational technology (OT) cybersecurity teams assess the cybersecurity posture of mission-critical sites and environments, reducing assessment time from months to minutes with zero impact on operations. Follow our blog, connect with us on LinkedIn, or visit our website at www.frenos.io.

About Momenta

Momenta is the leading Industrial Impact® venture capital + growth firm, accelerating industrial innovators across energy, manufacturing, smart spaces, and the supply chain. For over a decade, our team of deep industry operators has helped scale industry leaders and innovators to improve critical industries, the environment, and people's quality of life. (www.momenta.vc).

About Exposition Ventures

Exposition Ventures backs early-stage founders building the infrastructure of the next industrial age because innovation in physical products only scales through innovation in how they’re made. We are a team of experienced operators, investors, and innovators who understand both the technical depth and commercial realities of building in this space. Progress made probable™. Learn more about us at exposition.ventures.

1: Source: Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), "Look What You Made Us Patch: 2025 Zero-Days in Review," published February 2026.