Frenos raises USD $1.52 million to boost OT security

Frenos has raised USD $1.52 million in a seed extension round, bringing the OT security company's total funding to USD $6.4 million.

Momenta and Exposition Ventures led the round, with participation from Riptide Ventures. Frenos will use the funding to expand its customer success team and grow its artificial intelligence research and development staff.

The funding comes as Frenos introduces SAIRA Co-Work, a new version of its reasoning engine designed to work with live digital twin data and support users during security investigations. The broader goal is to develop a simulated penetration testing platform for operational technology environments used in critical infrastructure and defence.

Operational technology security has drawn increased attention as industrial groups connect more systems and face more cyber threats. Market research firm MarketsandMarkets estimates the sector will grow from USD $27.4 billion in 2026 to USD $58.9 billion by 2031.

Google's Threat Intelligence Group also reported what it described as the first known zero-day exploit developed with AI, adding to concerns that automated tools are making it easier for attackers to study software and build more advanced attacks.

Growth claims

Frenos said annual recurring revenue has risen more than 10-fold since the start of 2025. Revenue grew 215 per cent in the first half of 2026, following 225 per cent growth in the previous year.

The company also said its sales pipeline is up 2.7 times year on year, with more new pipeline created in the first half of 2026 than in all of 2025 combined. Average deal size has increased 3.2 times as the business has moved further into enterprise and critical infrastructure accounts.

Its platform is based on a digital twin of a customer's network. According to Frenos, the system simulates penetration tests to identify which vulnerabilities are genuinely exploitable in real network conditions, without scanning production systems or taking operations offline.

In one customer environment, SAIRA reviewed more than 12,000 OT vulnerability findings and identified eight that were exploitable in the actual network context, reducing remediation noise by 99.9 per cent, according to the company.

Brian Proctor, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Frenos, linked the product to a long-standing gap in OT defence tools.

"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 Chief Executive Officer, Frenos.

He also outlined how the new funding will be used.

"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," said Proctor.

Investor backing

Investors described Frenos as part of a broader shift in industrial cyber defence, where standard IT-focused tools often do not fit production environments.

"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.

Exposition Ventures made a similar case for specialist OT tools as cyber risks and automation increase across industrial settings.

"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."

Frenos has also drawn support from industry figures outside the investor group. Robert M. Lee, an advisory board member at the company and Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Dragos, said the value of OT testing lies in understanding whether an attacker can move from one exposed asset to a process that can be disrupted.

"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 Lee.