security
May 9, 2026
By Teun
Intruder launches AI pentesting agents that finish in minutes
Intruder, a London cybersecurity startup backed by GCHQ’s Cyber Accelerator, has launched AI pentesting agents that mimic human methodology and return results in minutes. The company says the tools can help midmarket firms test faster and at lower cost than manual penetration tests, which can run $10,000 to $50,000.
Intruder, a London-based cybersecurity company that came out of GCHQ’s Cyber Accelerator, has launched AI pentesting agents that the company says can replicate the methodology of a human penetration tester in minutes. Chris Wallis, Intruder’s chief executive, is set to present the technology at KnowBe4’s KB4-CON conference on 13 May.
The launch targets a long-standing problem in security testing: manual penetration tests are expensive, slow to schedule and slow to complete. According to the source article, a manual pentest can cost between $10,000 and $50,000, may take weeks to arrange and days to carry out, and often produces a report that is already stale by the time it is delivered.
Intruder says its AI agents are designed to automate the second stage of that process. When a vulnerability scanner raises a possible issue, the agent interacts directly with the target system, sends requests, analyses responses and probes for exposed data to work out whether the finding is a real vulnerability or a false positive.
The company says the current release focuses on issue-level investigations. That includes checks for injection attacks, client-side vulnerabilities and information disclosure. According to Intruder, broader web application penetration testing is planned by the end of the current quarter, with the agents eventually chaining multiple findings together to map attack paths across an application.
The distinction matters because vulnerability scanners and penetration tests do different jobs. Scanners can flag thousands of possible problems, but many of those alerts are false positives or low-risk findings that still consume security team time. A pentester’s role is to validate which findings can actually be exploited. Intruder’s pitch is that AI can now handle that validation step at machine speed.
Wallis founded Intruder in 2015 after working as an ethical hacker and later moving into corporate security. The company was selected for GCHQ’s Cyber Accelerator, a UK government-linked programme that supports cybersecurity startups with commercial potential. Intruder was also named the fastest-growing cybersecurity company in the UK on Deloitte’s Tech Fast 50 list in 2023, according to the article.
The company says it now protects more than 3,000 organisations and generated about $16 million in revenue in 2024, up from $10 million in 2023. It says it has raised only $1.5 million in external funding, which the article describes as unusually low compared with many competitors in the sector.
Intruder’s platform already combines attack surface management, cloud security and continuous vulnerability scanning in one interface. The new AI pentesting agents are being added to that stack for midmarket organisations - companies that face meaningful cyber risk but usually cannot afford frequent manual pentests or large in-house security teams.
The launch comes as the wider market races to automate vulnerability discovery and validation. The article cites Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, which it says found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across major operating systems and browsers in a single pass, and xBow, an autonomous pentesting startup that reached unicorn status in March 2026 after raising $120 million.
Other players are also moving quickly. Pentera has passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, and Horizon3.ai’s NodeZero has run more than 170,000 autonomous penetration tests in production environments, according to the article.
Intruder’s own research, published in its Security Middle Child Report in March 2026, found that 42% of midmarket security teams describe themselves as stretched, overwhelmed or consistently behind. The company says that helps explain demand for tools that can cut the time between finding a possible flaw and proving whether it matters.
The broader market for penetration testing is estimated at roughly $2.5 billion to $3 billion and is growing at 12% to 16% a year, according to the article. Intruder is positioning its AI agents as a way to bring on-demand testing closer to the budgets and timelines of midmarket customers, while the company continues to expand the scope of what those agents can investigate.
