Pentest-Tools.com - Our story
It started on a balcony
Back in 2013, our founder Adrian Furtuna was a decade into his career as a penetration tester. He worked at KPMG, running assessments for financial institutions and telecoms across Romania and Europe. The work was rigorous. His tools were not (he didn’t blame them, though, because he’s a good engineer!).
Most of the workflow was manual. Open-source tools from Backtrack (the ancestor of Kali) were the industry standard... when they worked. Piping output from one tool into the next required scripting workarounds, and the only remote testing services available were obscure platforms Adrian didn't trust with client data.
Adrian did what engineers do: he built something for himself.
The first version of Pentest-Tools.com ran from a Pentium 4 desktop server on Adrian's balcony: Debian Linux, a public IP, and a web interface over a handful of open-source tools. Basic, but always on, and always accessible. When the first payment came in from someone he'd never met, something clicked. The frustration that drove him to build this was apparently universal.
In 2017, Adrian formed the first team, entered the Innovation Labs startup accelerator in Romania, and won the grand prize. That's the moment we mark as the true birth of Pentest-Tools.com.
There are these two dimensions — the technical need, and the personal challenge.
Adrian Furtuna, Founder & CEO
We disagreed with an industry
The penetration testing industry had a scaling problem that nobody was seriously solving. Sorry, not sorry.
True security expertise is scarce. The pool of experienced penetration testers who could understand business context and interpret a vulnerability's real-world impact was too small and wasn't growing fast enough.
The tools dominating the market were making things worse. Vulnerability scanners returned sheets of version-based detections matched against CVE databases, with no validation a vulnerability was actually exploitable in that specific configuration.
We set out to democratize offensive security testing.
We wanted it to be accessible not just to elite red teams, but to the internal security professional who also handles patching, incident response, and compliance. Our conviction has always been that making security teams faster and more certain is worth more than flooding them with unverified data.
Not all vulnerabilities are created equal. When you receive a report with 100 vulnerabilities and you need to manually pass through each one, it creates more work than it helps you.
Adrian Furtuna, Founder & CEO
From good idea to global platform - centered + video @ beginning - snake / ignore quotes
QUOTE RIGHT AFTER SNEK
The best validation is exploitation — otherwise it's just words. You need to prove it.
Adrian Furtuna, Founder & CEO
Proof over noise, every day
A bank's information security manager used Sniper after a critical vulnerability appeared in a core banking software. He got proof of exploitation, walked into the IT team's office, and the vulnerability was patched in two hours.
That story captures what we actually deliver: not scan volume, but defensible, actionable evidence. Or, as we’ve come to think of it internally, ‘accuracy is the new product’. Security teams are stretched. Typically, two or three people are responsible for the entire security posture of a complex organization, and they don't have time to triage noise.
He told me this had never happened before. Whenever he came with vulnerabilities, the IT team said they were busy and would put it on the to-do list. With real proof, it was closed almost immediately.
Adrian Furtuna, Founder & CEO
Every confirmed vulnerability in our product is validated.
By that, we mean tested, not version-matched against a database. When something is marked confirmed, teams can act on it immediately. We ensure we embed new detections and exploits as they emerge, so customers can rely on us to be current.
The future is continuous and AI-native
We've done extensive research into where AI changes what's possible in offensive security — not as a feature add-on, but as a fundamental shift in how assessments are conducted. The difference between today's automated workflows and what's coming is adaptability. Our Pentest Robots follow predefined sequences. AI agents reason about what they find, adjust their approach in real time, and present decisions.
Autonomous penetration testing is a coordinated system of AI agents mimicking human testers, from reconnaissance to exploitation, and it’s already showing promising results internally. We're building with clear eyes about AI's limitations. We've built external validators that provide a second layer of verification on every result an AI agent produces — because confidence without proof is exactly the problem we set out to solve.
The future of Pentest-Tools.com relies on utilizing AI-based technologies to stay ahead of cyber attackers and proactively protect our customers.
Adrian Furtuna, Founder & CEO