KnowBe4 reports 35% AI ARR growth as it adds agent security
KnowBe4, the security awareness training vendor trusted by more than 70,000 organisations worldwide, has reported that AI-related annual recurring revenue grew more than 35% over the past year. The company attributed the gain to its AIDA (Artificial Intelligence Defense Agents) platform, the launch of a new SAT Advanced training tier, and expansion of its email and collaboration security portfolio. International markets also expanded at a double-digit rate, with the EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions cited as the largest contributors.
Chief executive Bryan Palma said the company had spent the past year transforming from a security awareness training provider into what it now describes as a broader digital workforce security platform. "As organisations deploy AI agents alongside employees, they need security strategies that address both," he said. KnowBe4 did not disclose an absolute ARR figure, post-money valuation, or customer-level contract values alongside the announcement.
Product expansion
The company shipped several product updates in 2026. SAT Advanced, launched in May, pairs KnowBe4's full training content library with AIDA and introduced a two-tier pricing structure alongside the lower-cost SAT Foundation offer. Real-Time Coaching, released in August, delivers in-moment security prompts when risky behaviour is detected, replacing a model reliant on after-the-fact training alone. A simulated vishing capability, launched this month, extends attack simulation to voice-based social engineering, reflecting a shift in attacker tactics beyond email.
On the collaboration security side, the company added phishing defence for Microsoft Teams in May. KnowBe4 also cited its behavioural dataset, described as 16 years of phishing simulations processing 1.15 billion event signals daily across its customer base, as a differentiator in detecting employee risk patterns.
The company's Agent Risk Manager, announced in April, gives security teams visibility into AI agent behaviour and governance controls. An August extension added support for Anthropic's Claude, adding to existing coverage of Microsoft Copilot. KnowBe4 said AIDA Orchestration has reduced administrative time for personalised training programmes from hours to seconds and that early deployments showed a 10% reduction in customer Risk Score, reached four times faster than with human-led programmes.
Market context and competitive landscape
The security awareness training market has matured considerably since KnowBe4 entered it in 2010, with the vendor now sitting alongside competitors including Proofpoint Security Awareness, Mimecast Awareness Training and Cofense. The more novel contest is over AI agent governance, where a growing number of cybersecurity and identity vendors are positioning products to monitor autonomous agent activity inside enterprises. Demand is being shaped by the rapid deployment of AI copilots and agents in productivity suites, which creates new attack surfaces including prompt injection and shadow AI.
KnowBe4's ISO/IEC 42001 certification, achieved this year, positions it under an AI management systems standard that is increasingly referenced by enterprise procurement teams and regulators as a baseline for responsible AI deployment. The company also received accreditation from Italy's Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale in September, enabling it to serve Italian public sector organisations and critical infrastructure operators directly.
Its 2026 Phishing by Industry Benchmarking Report, based on 42 million simulated phishing tests across 64,000 organisations, found that phishing attacks rose 17.1% in the second half of 2025, while sustained awareness training reduced average susceptibility from 33.2% at baseline to 4.2% after one year. Those figures, if externally validated, provide a strong commercial narrative as buyers shift procurement criteria from training completion rates to measurable behaviour change.
KnowBe4 has appointed six senior leaders since February, including a new CFO, chief customer officer, chief growth officer and channel chief. Near-term milestones include its first KB4-CON user conference in Japan this November, which will test the scalability of the community model in a strategically important market.