Earlier this month, AI hacking startup Horizon3 reached a rare milestone: a $250 million funding round pushed its market value above $2 billion, making it a so-called double unicorn.
CEO Snehal Antani said he spent nearly two decades acquiring the skills he needed to build the company, which simulates cyber attacks on companies’ systems to identify vulnerabilities before real hackers can exploit them. The knowledge he gained proved crucial, first when the technology financing market tightened and later when the bank where Horizon3 held all its money collapsed.
“I wanted to make sure I had the right experiences,” Antani, now 46, told Business Insider.
After graduating from college, he said he learned about launching products at IBM, organizational management at GE Capital, scaling a hyper-growth company at software maker Splunk and leadership at the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). It was also at JSOC where Antani met Air Force veteran Anthony Pillitiere, his co-founder of Horizon3.
A different path
Antani’s path runs counter to the familiar Silicon Valley image of the college dropout founder, epitomized by figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gateswho started Facebook and Microsoft respectively as teenagers. Yet research shows that successful founders are often older than startup culture stereotypes suggest. An MIT Sloan study published in 2020 analyzed 2.7 million U.S. entrepreneurs and found that the average age of the founders behind the fastest-growing 0.1% of new ventures was 45.
For Antani, the value of a later start was quickly tested. Three years after he founded Horizon3 in 2019, the technology financing environment abruptly changed and the company suddenly had to survive on the money raised for much longer than planned.
Antani said he remembered a lesson from the CEO of one of his former employers on how to weather an economic downturn: Instead of cutting your way through it, sell your way through it. He said Horizon3 did both. The company found approximately $3 million in costs that needed to be reduced or reversed, including changes to employee benefits, hiring plans and other operating costs. It then reinvested that money in sales and marketing, which Antani says grew revenue nearly fivefold year over year.
Flirting with disaster
In 2023, Horizon3 came closer to disaster. If Silicon Valley Bank was collapsingAntani said he got a text message from an investor asking how much of the startup’s money was being held there. His answer: “100%.”
By the time federal regulators took over, Horizon3 had opened an account at another bank. But funds at Silicon Valley Bank were frozen, and missing payroll could have led to as much as $750,000 a day in fines in California — enough, Antani said, to put the company out of business within a week.
To avoid that, Antani said he withdrew $1 million from a personal line of credit. Then he and his management team agreed to tell employees what was going on and what they were doing about it.
After regulators restored access to Horizon3’s Silicon Valley Bank funds, the company repaid Antani. He said the episode made use of the leadership lessons At JSOC he mainly learned the importance of dealing with crises.
“It’s about being stable, calm and collected,” he said. “You shouldn’t panic.”
One learning curve
For all the experience Antani brought to Horizon3, there was one part of the founder’s job that he had never done before: fundraising. To bridge that gap, he said he treated his early investor meetings as a crash course, repeatedly refining his pitch deck, financial model and market case in response to the questions posed to him.
“You kind of suck the first time,” Antani said. “You have to invest in a good storyteller.”
After dozens of investor meetings, Antani said he mastered his pitch and received two term sheetsone of which he chose for Horizon3’s $3.5 million seed round – the venture capital firm SignalFire. (The company’s latest raise was co-led by NightDragon and NEA.)
Today, Horizon3 is much larger than the small team Antani started with, made up of former intelligence, special operations and enterprise software veterans – mostly people he knew through his past work. The company, one of the first companies to adopt the concept of a AI hacker on the market, has approximately 7,000 customers and 550 employees worldwide. Antani said the experience he has gained across different companies, roles and environments has made that possible.
“As a founder, you don’t want to learn to deal with HR issues for the first time,” he says. “You want to have learned those kinds of things ahead of time.”
