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Horizon3.ai boss talks of partner importance
Security player has seen its revenues via the channel continue to grow as it looks to ramp up its indirect business
From the start, Horizon3.ai has viewed the channel as a fundamental route to market, with its position delivering growth and getting the security player in front of more customers.
The vendor issued an update late last year around the momentum it had developed with the channel in the fourth quarter, seeing a 101% growth in revenue year on year (YoY), with a 106% climb in its partner-sourced pipeline, thanks to the efforts of its resellers and managed security service providers (MSSPs).
Six months on and the song remains the same, with Snehal Antani, CEO of Horizon3.ai, revealing that the company has continued that growth and partner momentum into 2026, with the numbers being a result of backing the channel, rather than establishing a direct business and then looking to bring partners on board.
“We knew we had to be channel first,” said Antani. “I knew from day one, so I built the entire go-to-market around the channel, and that’s why we’re able to be successful. Companies that try to bolt the channel on after the fact almost always create conflict between channel sales and their existing sales reps.
“Cyber security is a last-mile trust sale, and that last mile of trust has usually been built and invested in by channel partners that have built those relationships over years and over decades.
“Channel partners bring two things to the table for us: they extend our reach as a company into markets where they’ve already established trust, and they accelerate the sales process because they’ve already got paper in place,” he said.
The firm will shortly be announcing its second-quarter numbers – but, based on progress made so far this fiscal year, the expectation is the numbers will underline the contribution of the channel.
Antani said the focus was on increasing the volume of business that went via the channel and growing that over the next few years, as well as working with partners to expand the geographical reach of the business. The firm currently gets around 40% of its sales coming via partners but the ambition is to get to around 60% in the next fiscal year.
He said the firm’s decision not to offer services enabled partners to take its pen testing and add more to the sale with remediation services of their own: “They will bundle remediation services, security-tuning services…they will upsell or cross-sell incident response services or new tools that are that are there.
“If you can bundle remediation services with our pen test results, you’re going to make money not just finding problems, but helping your customers fix them very quickly.”
Antani added that Horizon3.ai had been quick to work on the idea of decoys to divert artificial intelligence attacks and had seen success in efforts to drag criminal agents away from sensitive data. That activity would also be a benefit to its channel base, he argued.
“Who’s going to react to the alert? Somebody has to have that incident response expertise. Our partners are bundling incident response services with these decoys that we set out in an environment, so that if an attacker does interact, they’re able to sell almost like an overwatch service or a backstop type capability,” he said.
