Funding from leading industrial investors accelerates cyber resilience for critical infrastructure and defense through continuously validated OT security posture
AI-native OT security pioneer Frenos announced a $1.52 million seed extension led by Momenta and Exposition Ventures, joined by Riptide Ventures, bringing total funding to $6.4 million. The capital will grow the customer success team supporting a rapidly expanding base across critical infrastructure and defense, and expand the company’s AI R&D team.
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That investment is already producing results: 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 continues toward a next-generation foundation model for long-context reasoning and autonomous engineering workflows.
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 and cyber-physical threats accelerate alongside IT/OT convergence. In 2026, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group reported the first known zero-day exploit developed with AI, warning that AI tools are lowering the barrier for adversaries to build sophisticated exploits.
“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,” said Brian Proctor, founder and CEO of Frenos. “I spent over a decade defending these environments and never had a tool that could tell me that. So we built one. 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.”
The Frenos Platform provides these insights 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, chaining exploits the way an attacker would and prioritizing the risks that matter most, with no hardware, no scanning, and no downtime.
“Most OT security testing tells you what’s vulnerable, not what’s defensible. The question that matters is what path takes an attacker from an exposed human-machine interface (HMI) to a process they can actually disrupt, and almost nobody is testing for that,” said Robert M. Lee, Frenos advisory board member and co-founder and CEO of Dragos. “Frenos is one of the only teams I’ve seen build a platform that thinks in those terms without putting production at risk. That’s why I joined the advisory board.”
The round follows a year of significant momentum. Annual recurring revenue is up more than 10x since the start of 2025, growing 215 percent in the first half of 2026. Pipeline is up 2.7x year over year, average deal size is up 5x as Frenos moves upmarket, and 2026 bookings have already quadrupled full-year 2025 with five months remaining. In one customer environment, SAIRA analyzed more than 12,000 OT vulnerability findings and surfaced the eight that were actually exploitable, 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.
“Traditional IT security tools fail in industrial settings, but Frenos delivers the precise, safe visibility operators need to manage risk without threatening production,” said Carlos Furlotti, Principal, Exposition Ventures. “The team is uniquely poised to transform OT security, and we are proud to back them.”
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