Frenos, a company that builds AI-native security testing for operational technology, closed a $1.52m seed extension on 28 July 2026. Momenta and Exposition Ventures led it, with Riptide Ventures also taking part.
Total seed funding is now $6.4m. The company did not disclose a valuation or give a figure for its earlier rounds in the announcement.
“I spent over a decade defending these environments and never had a tool that could tell me that. So we built one.”Brian Proctor, founder and CEO, Frenos
What Frenos does
Operational technology is the hardware and software that runs industrial sites such as power plants and factories. Frenos runs simulated penetration tests on a digital twin of such an environment, so testing does not cause downtime. Its platform is paired with SAIRA, an AI reasoning agent, and the company launched SAIRA Co-Work alongside the funding, a persistent assistant that reasons over live digital twin data.
The company serves critical infrastructure enterprises and defence organisations and did not name customers. In one customer environment SAIRA analysed more than 12,000 OT vulnerability findings and identified eight as exploitable, a 99.9% reduction in remediation noise, according to the company.
Growth claims
Frenos said annual recurring revenue is up more than tenfold since the start of 2025 and grew 215% in the first half of 2026. Pipeline is up 2.7 times year on year, average deal size is up fivefold and 2026 bookings had already quadrupled full-year 2025 with five months of the year left. All of these figures are the company's own, and no absolute revenue numbers were given.
The company cited MarketsandMarkets, which projects the OT security market will grow from $27.4bn in 2026 to $58.9bn by 2031.
People and plans
Brian Proctor is founder and chief executive. Robert M. Lee, co-founder and chief executive of Dragos, is on Frenos's advisory board and said most OT security testing tells you what is vulnerable, not what is defensible.
Michael Dolbec, managing partner at Momenta, said the company is the kind of industrial innovation his firm looks for. Carlos Furlotti, a principal at Exposition Ventures, said traditional IT security tools fail in industrial settings.
Frenos will use the money to grow its customer success team and expand AI research and development. It also plans research towards a foundation model for long-context reasoning and autonomous engineering workflows. Headcount was not disclosed.
Product direction
The company's platform runs simulated penetration tests on a digital twin, and the Adversary Intelligence Engine is another component mentioned on its announcement page. SAIRA Co-Work is designed to support evidence-based investigations, the summary of the SecurityWeek report said.
Frenos said it plans research towards a next-generation foundation model for long-context reasoning and autonomous engineering workflows, which would support a future AI-powered simulated penetration testing platform. Proctor said he spent more than a decade defending these environments and built the tool he never had.
Context for the round
The extension is small next to the growth the company describes. Frenos did not give absolute revenue, customer counts or contract values, so the percentage figures cannot be tied to a dollar amount. It is also the company's own account of the market, backed by a cited market forecast, rather than an independent measurement. The announcement page also listed later items, such as a Gartner Cool Vendor naming and a US Department of Energy award of $1.1m, that came after the funding.
Company website: frenos.io