Cobalt Closes 2025 With Unprecedented Scale, Breakthrough AI Innovation, and 88 G2 Badges

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SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec 18, 2025--

Cobalt, the pioneer of Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) and leading provider of human-led, AI-powered offensive security solutions, today announced the close of its strongest year ever, delivering unprecedented scale, accelerated AI innovation, and industry-defining leadership as enterprises adopt modern, continuous pentesting.

In 2025, Cobalt delivered over 31,000 testing days, and completed almost 255,000 hours of hands-on testing, uncovering an average of 12 critical vulnerabilities per day. Its customer base grew over 7%—with particularly strong momentum across mid-to-large enterprises. Cobalt also maintained an exceptional pentest NPS score of 9, reflecting deep customer trust and consistent value delivered throughout the year.

Cobalt delivered a wave of major technical advancements in 2025, introducing a suite of AI-powered capabilities that modernize every stage of the pentesting lifecycle. New features include:

• AI-Powered Scoping: To identify priority assets for testing.
• AI Pentest Assistant: To summarize historical findings and recommend next steps.
• AI-Driven Insights and Benchmarking: Providing peer comparisons and actionable guidance based on more than a decade of testing data.
• AI-Assisted Findings and Reporting: Accelerating documentation workflows.

Enhancements to pentest planning included a new Calendar View for scheduling and asset alignment, alongside new Insights and Benchmarks, which tracks progress over time, benchmarks against peers, and identifies actionable steps to strengthen security posture.

“This year, it became unequivocally clear that traditional pentesting simply cannot keep pace with fast-moving development cycles or the growing sophistication of AI-enabled threats,” said Sonali Shah, CEO, Cobalt. “Security leaders need offensive security that works at the speed and scale of their business. Cobalt brings together the precision of human-led expertise, the efficiency of AI, and learnings from years of testing data to give organizations continuous insight into their real-world risk. The momentum we saw in 2025 is a direct reflection of our commitment to making pentesting more transparent, more actionable, and more aligned to business outcomes.”

Cobalt strengthened its leadership bench in 2025 with the addition of two industry veterans whose expertise will shape the next era of the platform. The company welcomed Gunter Ollmann as CTO, bringing decades of experience in applied security research, adversarial modeling, and large-scale cyber innovation. Cobalt appointed Joseph Brinkley as Head of Offensive Security Research and Community, deepening its ability to deliver attacker-informed testing methodologies and real-world insights that mirror how modern adversaries operate. Under Ollman’s leadership, the Cobalt Core community expanded from 450 to 500 elite pentesters—an 11% increase—reflecting the company’s commitment to scaling specialized expertise alongside its AI-enhanced capabilities.

Together, Ollmann and Brinkley are helping to fuse human-led mastery with continuous, intelligence-driven validation, strengthen pentester enablement, and elevate offensive security into a more rigorous and resilient discipline that benefits every customer on the platform.

Cobalt received significant industry recognition throughout 2025:

• GigaOm Radar: Named a Leader and Fast Mover in the 2025 GigaOm Radar for PTaaS, marking its fourth consecutive year in the Leader position.
• Gartner Recognition: Recognized for the third consecutive year across the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Application Security, 2025, Hype Cycle for Security Operations, 2025, and Hype Cycle for XaaS, 2025Reports.
• G2 Leadership: Received 88 G2 badges in 2025, ranking #1 in nine categories in the Winter 2026 Report, including #1 among 42 vendors in the Grid® Report for Penetration Testing.
• Industry Awards: Won six industry awards, including the Fortress Award for Best Application Security solution, Top InfoSec Innovators Awards for its PTaaS solution, and the Cybersecurity Breakthrough Award for Pentesting Solution of the Year.

Cobalt enters 2026 with continued investments in AI-augmented analysis, deeper threat research, expanded integrations, and enhanced enterprise capabilities.

Gartner Hype Cycle for Application Security, By Dionisio Zumerle, July 22, 2025
Gartner Hype Cycle for Security Operations, 2025, By Jonathan Nunez, Darren Livingstone, June 23, 2025
Gartner Hype Cycle for XaaS, 2025, By Jason Donham, July 28, 2025

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to its research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Cobalt

Cobalt is the pioneer in penetration testing as a service (PTaaS) and a leader in human-led, AI-powered offensive security services. We are focused on combining talent and technology with speed, scalability, and expertise. Thousands of customers and hundreds of partners rely on the Cobalt Offensive Security Platform, along with 500+ trusted security experts, to find and fix vulnerabilities across their environments. By enabling faster pentest launches, real-time collaboration with pentesters, and seamless integration with remediation workflows, we help organizations identify critical issues and accelerate risk mitigation so they can operate fearlessly and innovate securely.

Cobalt maintains an outstanding NPS of 9, reflecting its dedication to customer satisfaction. Read our reviews on G2 to see why customers love us. More at https://www.cobalt.io. Follow Cobalt on LinkedIn and X.

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CONTACT: Media:

Leslie Kesselring

Kesselring Communication for Cobalt

[email protected]

KEYWORD: CALIFORNIA UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA

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SOURCE: Cobalt

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PUB: 12/18/2025 08:00 AM/DISC: 12/18/2025 08:02 AM

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