Equixly has announced the expansion of its European operations, with significant investment in go-to-market roles aimed at modernising how enterprises secure applications and APIs.
The move comes as organisations increasingly recognise the limitations of traditional penetration testing, which relies on periodic assessments that struggle to keep pace with continuously changing application environments.
“Our Series A marked the start of our scale phase,” said Mattia Dalla Piazza, Co-Founder and CEO of Equixly. “We’re investing deliberately in go-to-market expertise, hiring leaders with deep cybersecurity backgrounds to help accelerate our expansion across the UK and Europe. These hires strengthen our ability to execute on our mission to make offensive security continuous, autonomous, and intelligent, empowering every organization to meet AI-powered attackers with AI of their own.”
A key part of the expansion includes the appointment of Stephen Schouten as Regional Sales Director for the UK and Northern Europe. The hire reflects Equixly’s focus on building experienced leadership in markets where enterprise demand for modern security approaches is growing rapidly. Schouten previously held senior positions at Snyk and BeyondTrust, where he helped scale security-led businesses.
“Enterprises are under enormous pressure to innovate through APIs and modern applications, but penetration testing hasn’t kept pace,” said Stephen Schouten, Regional Sales Director at Equixly. “Attackers operate continuously and use automation and AI, while most organizations still test periodically. Equixly enables a proactive shift, continuously attacking applications and APIs the way real adversaries do. That’s a meaningful step forward for the industry, and I’m excited to help bring this approach to enterprises across the UK and Northern Europe.”
To support large-scale customer adoption, Equixly has also strengthened its technical and commercial teams. Paul Harland, formerly of Snyk, joins as Solutions Engineer, while Stephen McCafferty, previously with Cymulate, has joined the business development function.
The company has also invested in marketing leadership for the first time, appointing Gavin Sutton to lead global marketing and category development as Equixly works to define a new approach to offensive security.
“Security investment has long been driven by reaction,” said Gavin Sutton, Head of Marketing at Equixly. “Leaders often ask, ‘Has this happened to us?’ because known incidents are easier to justify than unseen risk. Our role is to help shift that mindset from reacting after breaches to continuously exposing real, exploitable risk before attackers do.”
Equixly was founded to enable organisations to move away from scheduled penetration tests towards continuous, autonomous offensive security. Its platform is already in use across leading European financial institutions, using an Agentic AI Hacker to emulate real attacker behaviour against modern applications and APIs.
As it continues to grow its footprint across the UK and Europe, Equixly will be engaging with customers, partners and the media at TechEx.
About Equixly
Equixly is the Agentic penetration testing platform for securing modern applications and APIs in constantly evolving environments. Its purpose-built Agentic AI hacker enables a continuous offensive security approach by attacking like a real adversary, uncovering exploitable risks across APIs, workflows, and business logic, and delivering actionable insights so security and engineering teams can fix issues faster and innovate with confidence. Trusted by leading European banks, insurers, and payment giants, Equixly was founded by Mattia and Alessio Dalla Piazza, and backed by 33N Ventures, Alpha Intelligence Capital, JME Ventures, 360 Capital and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze. Learn more at www.equixly.com
