red-team
(6)
Hack The Box makes failure worth practicing
A hacker built the practice ground he wanted. Millions joined. Now Hack The Box is selling security teams something harder to buy than software: rehearsal for the moment things go wrong.
The Pentest That Never Clocks Out
A solo hacker in Madison got tired of writing the same annual report twice. So he built software to run the test all year - and turned continuous penetration testing into a business.
MindFort
MindFort is a San Francisco AI security lab building autonomous agents that continuously find, validate, and patch vulnerabilities in web applications and APIs. Founded out of Y Combinator's X25 batch by offensive-security veterans, it runs like a 24/7 AI red team - proving exploits in isolated runtime environments before it reports them, then opening pull requests with the fix. The company raised a $3M+ seed led by Soma Capital in April 2026.
Praetorian
Praetorian is an Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity company that helps organizations prevent breaches by combining an adversarial, offensive-security mindset with automation and AI. Founded in 2010 by CEO Nathan Sportsman, the firm pairs elite red-team engineers with its flagship Chariot platform for Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) and attack surface management, plus services spanning penetration testing, cloud and product security, and adversarial emulation. Its clients include large technology, finance, healthcare, and automotive organizations, and it maintains open-source tools such as the Nosey Parker secrets scanner.
Strike
Strike is a cybersecurity company that runs always-on, continuous penetration testing by combining AI-driven offensive emulations with validation from an elite network of human ethical hackers it calls Strikers. Its platform and proprietary engine, Strike360, continuously test web apps, APIs, mobile apps, cloud infrastructure and internal networks, then guide teams through remediation and compliance. Founded in 2021 by Santiago Rosenblatt - a hacker since age six - Strike protects 120+ enterprises across 20+ countries, including Santander, Mercado Libre and Okta.
Cobalt
Cobalt is the pioneer of Pentest as a Service (PtaaS), pairing a curated community of vetted offensive-security experts (the Cobalt Core) with a SaaS platform that turns penetration testing from a months-long procurement exercise into an on-demand, continuous program. Founded in 2013, the company now serves 1,500+ customers and is leaning hard into AI-augmented offensive security.