New in-country sovereign instance delivers production-safe autonomous security validation with full Australian data residency, enabling government, critical infrastructure, and enterprise customers to continuously prove resilience in the AI vs. AI era.
Horizon3, the AI-Native Proactive Security Company behind NodeZero®, the World’s Best AI Hacker™, today announced the general availability of its first Asia-Pacific Sovereign Instance, hosted in Sydney. The new Australian point of presence keeps all customer data resident in-country and enables Australian organisations to run continuous, production-safe autonomous penetration testing under full data sovereignty.
As adversaries increasingly weaponise AI to discover and exploit vulnerabilities at machine speed, organisations can no longer rely on theoretical findings or periodic assessments. NodeZero continuously validates real, exploitable attack paths across Internal, External, Cloud, Identity, and Web Application surfaces—then drives a disciplined hack–fix–verify loop so customers can prove their defences actually hold. The Sydney Sovereign Instance makes this capability available onshore for the first time in the region, giving Australian organisations a practical way to operationalise Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) with continuous, attacker-validated evidence.
The instance is purpose-built for the highest-trust Australian environments, including government agencies, critical infrastructure operators, Defence Industrial Base organisations, major banks, and other regulated entities. By keeping data resident in Australia and operating under local control, it helps organisations meet key requirements under the SOCI Act, APRA CPS 234, the ASD Essential Eight, and related frameworks, while reducing operational and data sovereignty risk.
“Australian organisations face the same AI-accelerated threat landscape as the rest of the world, but they rightly demand that the tools they use to defend themselves meet the highest standards of data residency and national control,” said Gareth Cox, Vice President of Sales, Asia Pacific and Japan, Horizon3. “With the Sydney Sovereign Instance, customers can now run the World’s Best AI Hacker continuously and safely, knowing their data never leaves Australia. This enables them to move beyond assumptions and continuously prove which exposures actually matter—and that remediation works.”
“Data sovereignty is no longer a compliance checkbox, it is a strategic requirement for any platform trusted with critical infrastructure and national security workloads,” said Snehal Antani, Co-Founder and CEO of Horizon3. “As AI-powered attacks accelerate, countries will only allow continuous, autonomous security validation on their most sensitive networks if they know the data remains under their control and is accessed by cleared nationals. The Sydney Sovereign Instance is the first step in making NodeZero available as a true national-scale capability for Australia.”
The Sydney instance complements Horizon3’s existing points of presence in the United States and Germany and marks the company’s first Sovereign Instance in Asia Pacific. It follows Horizon3’s recent US$250 million Series E at a valuation exceeding US$2 billion, which is funding accelerated international expansion, including deeper investment across Australia, New Zealand, and the wider Asia-Pacific region.
Horizon3’s NodeZero platform has already executed more than 310,000 production-safe autonomous security tests for more than 7,500 organisations worldwide, including multinational banks, major healthcare networks, four Fortune 10 enterprises, and national security agencies. The company is FedRAMP High authorised and helps customers meet demanding regulatory regimes globally.
With the Sydney Sovereign Instance now generally available, Australian organisations can continuously find, prioritise, and verify the risks that actually matter, while keeping their most sensitive security data under Australian sovereign control.
