Pentera is an automated security validation company that enables enterprises to continuously test their defenses by safely running real attack techniques against their production environments. Unlike traditional penetration testing, which is periodic, manual, expensive, and limited in scope, Pentera automates the full attack lifecycle: reconnaissance, exploitation, lateral movement, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration. The platform validates security controls from both external and internal attack surfaces, providing proof of exploitability rather than theoretical vulnerability lists.
Automated Security Validation Platform
External Attack Surface Validation
Pentera discovers and tests an organization’s internet-facing assets as an external attacker would, identifying exposed services, misconfigurations, and exploitable vulnerabilities across domains, IPs, web applications, and cloud infrastructure. The platform requires no internal access, agents, or credentials to perform external validation. It operates purely from the attacker’s perspective using only a company name or domain as input.
Internal Network Penetration Testing
From inside the network, Pentera performs automated credential harvesting, privilege escalation, lateral movement, and exploitation of misconfigurations across Active Directory, network infrastructure, endpoints, and servers. The platform safely executes real attack techniques mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, including Kerberoasting, AS-REP roasting, relay attacks, and pass-the-hash to demonstrate real-world attack paths.
Credential Exposure Testing
The platform tests for weak, reused, and compromised credentials by performing credential-based attacks including password spraying, hash cracking, Kerberoasting, and pass-the-hash techniques against the production environment. Pentera also checks for credential leaks in publicly available data breaches to identify exposed employee accounts.
Ransomware Emulation
Pentera safely emulates full ransomware attack chains from initial access through lateral movement to encryption staging. This validates whether an organization’s security stack can detect and prevent ransomware from achieving its objectives. The platform tests endpoint protection, network segmentation, backup accessibility, and incident response procedures.
Active Directory Security
Dedicated Active Directory testing identifies misconfigurations, excessive privileges, delegation weaknesses, and attack paths that could allow an attacker to escalate from a standard user account to Domain Admin. The platform maps the full AD attack graph and demonstrates exploitable paths.
Remediation Prioritization
Rather than presenting thousands of theoretical vulnerabilities, Pentera shows only validated, exploitable attack paths with step-by-step remediation guidance. Each finding is prioritized by actual exploitability and business impact, not CVSS scores alone. This approach dramatically reduces the noise that security teams face from traditional vulnerability scanners, focusing attention on the vulnerabilities that actually matter.
Cloud Security Validation
Pentera extends its automated security validation to cloud environments, testing for misconfigurations, overly permissive IAM roles, exposed storage buckets, and exploitable cloud-native services across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Cloud testing validates that cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools are actually catching the issues they claim to detect.
Testing Approach
Pentera’s core differentiator is that it performs real exploitation rather than simulation. The platform executes safe but genuine attack techniques in production environments, proving whether an attack path is exploitable rather than theoretically possible. This approach provides higher-fidelity results than vulnerability scanners or breach-and-attack simulation (BAS) tools that rely on agent-based simulation.
All testing is designed to be production-safe, with built-in guardrails that prevent service disruption, data loss, or persistent changes to the environment. The platform automatically cleans up any artifacts created during testing and provides a complete audit trail of every action taken.
Continuous Security Validation
Rather than relying on point-in-time annual penetration tests, Pentera enables organizations to run security validation continuously on a weekly, monthly, or on-demand basis after infrastructure changes. This continuous validation model ensures that new vulnerabilities introduced by software updates, configuration changes, or infrastructure expansion are identified promptly rather than waiting for the next scheduled assessment.
Funding
Pentera raised $150 million in its Series C in 2024 led by Insight Partners. Earlier rounds included $25 million in Series B from Insight Partners in 2022 and approximately $14 million in seed and Series A funding. Total funding stands at $189 million.
Key investors include Insight Partners, K1 Investment Management, The Blackstone Group, AWZ Ventures, and Sino-Israeli Innovation Fund. The Series C round accelerated Pentera’s global expansion and investment in R&D for new attack techniques and platform capabilities.
Compliance and Reporting
Pentera generates executive and technical reports that map findings to compliance frameworks including PCI DSS, HIPAA, NIST CSF, and ISO 27001. These reports help organizations demonstrate continuous security validation to auditors and boards, supplementing traditional compliance activities with evidence of real-world security posture.
Market Position
Pentera serves over 1,000 enterprise customers globally across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, government, and critical infrastructure. The company competes in the automated security validation market against Horizon3.ai (NodeZero), AttackIQ, SafeBreach, Picus Security, and Cymulate.
Pentera’s differentiation is its agentless, real-exploitation approach that provides proof of exploitability rather than simulated attack results. The company has been recognized in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Security Operations and is driving enterprise adoption of continuous security validation as a complement to traditional annual penetration testing.
Leadership
Amitai Ratzon serves as CEO. Arik Liberzon is co-founder and CTO. Alex Spivakovsky co-founded the company and serves as VP of Research. Ran Tamir is Chief Product Officer.
Industry Recognition
Pentera has been recognized in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Security Operations and the Forrester landscape for breach attack simulation tools. The company’s real-exploitation approach has driven enterprise adoption of continuous security validation as a complement to, and in many cases a replacement for, traditional annual penetration testing engagements. Pentera maintains an active research team that continuously develops new safe exploitation techniques to keep pace with the evolving threat landscape.