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Momenta Leads Investment in Frenos

Michael Dolbec
Posted by Michael Dolbec
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July 28, 2026 | 6 min read

Momenta Leads Investment in Frenos, Advancing AI Native OT Cybersecurity 

Momenta, the leading Industrial Impact® venture capital firm, has co-led an investment in Frenos, alongside Exposition Ventures. Frenos is an AI-native OT penetration testing and security posture management platform that helps critical infrastructure operators continuously assess risk, validate defenses, and prioritize mitigations without touching production systems. 

 

Rebuilding OT Security for the AI Era 

Industrial cybersecurity is entering a new phase. Attackers are moving faster as AI compresses time to exploit and increases attack complexity. Yet much of OT security still relies on manual workflows, point-in-time assessments, and tools borrowed from IT that were never designed for environments where safety, uptime, and operational continuity are non-negotiable. 

That model is no longer good enough. In OT, if testing introduces operational risk, it will not be used consistently. And if security is only measured periodically, defenders are always behind. 
 
Frenos changes that equation. Built by operators who have run and defended critical infrastructure, the platform creates a digital twin of OT environments, then uses adversary reasoning and attack path simulation to continuously assess how real-world threats could move through those environments without touching live systems. 

This is critical in OT, where even a routine scan or misconfigured packet can disrupt operations. If a security tool introduces risk, it will not be used. 

By operating entirely outside of live production systems, Frenos removes the core adoption barrier that has held OT security back for years. It enables continuous security validation in environments where uptime matters more than theoretical completeness, giving operators a practical path from compliance-driven checklists to real cyber resilience. 

 

From Periodic Testing to Continuous Resilience 

Frenos shifts OT security from manual assessment to continuous intelligence: 

  • Digital twin modeling of OT environments using existing data

  • AI adversary reasoning, attack path simulation, and prioritized mitigations

  • Continuous assessment and posture trending with zero operational impact

Rather than producing theoretical risk scores, Frenos shows which attack paths are realistically feasible in an OT environment, which controls materially reduce risk, and which mitigations should be prioritized first based on operational context and business impact. 

Because it never interacts with production systems, Frenos delivers continuous security validation at scale across complex OT architectures, something traditional manual assessments and live-environment testing cannot achieve safely or consistently. 

 

Why Momenta Invested 

OT security has been held back for too long by tools and processes that were never built for the realities of industrial environments. You cannot defend critical infrastructure with episodic assessments, generic dashboards, and tooling that operators do not trust in production. Frenos changes the model by giving security teams a safe, continuous, and operationally credible way to understand how attacks would actually unfold in their environments and what to fix first. That is the kind of execution-grade OT cybersecurity the market needs.

- Michael Dolbec, Managing Partner Momenta

Frenos represents the kind of applied AI we believe matters in industrial markets: not AI for presentation, but AI that respects operational constraints, improves decision quality, and makes defenses more actionable in systems that cannot fail. 

Founder Perspective 
Industrial operators cannot secure what they cannot safely test. Frenos enables teams to continuously assess and defend their environments without introducing risk to operations. Partnering with Momenta allows us to accelerate this shift across critical infrastructure.
- Brian Proctor, CEO of Frenos
Execution Over Hype 

The cybersecurity market is crowded with tools that fail to translate into operational impact, especially in OT environments. Frenos stands out because it is built for how industrial systems actually operate: 

  • No disruption to production systems

  • Cloud, on prem, and air gapped environments

  • Purpose built for OT architectures

This is applied AI. Designed for systems that cannot fail.

Frenos is building the intelligence layer for industrial cyber resilience. 

orange-break@2x

 

Momenta is the leading Industrial Impact® venture capital firm, accelerating industrial innovators across energy, manufacturing, smart spaces, and the supply chain. Our team of deep industry operators has helped scale industry leaders and innovators to improve critical industries, the environment, and people's quality of life for over a decade. For more information, please visit http://www.momenta.vc

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