PitchBook's Institutional Research Group published a major analyst note on AI-driven cybersecurity investment, and Hardshell is featured alongside companies like Vectra AI and 7AI as one of six AI-native cybersecurity startups profiled for their perspective on the market.
The report finds that AI-native cybersecurity reached a structural inflection point in 2025, with AI cyber companies accounting for 50.5% of all global cybersecurity VC deals by count. AI cyber startups command higher median deal sizes, faster fundraising cadence, and stronger multiples on invested capital than non-AI peers across every stage.
Hardshell co-founder Andrew Schoka was interviewed on the maturity of enterprise demand for data-layer AI security. From the report: enterprise awareness is accelerating rapidly in high-stakes sectors like healthcare, defense, and financial services, and organizations are beginning to shift from reactive security spending toward proactive investment in protecting their AI adoption efforts.
The report also dedicates a section to data poisoning and model integrity risks, noting that even minimal dataset contamination below 0.01% of total training volume can meaningfully alter model behavior without detection. This is the exact problem Hardshell's platform is built to address, operating upstream of model training to profile, score, and harden datasets before threats get encoded into model weights.