KnowBe4 Delivers Strong 2026 Momentum as It Secures the Entire Workforce, People and AI Agents

AI-related ARR grew more than 35% over the past year as the company expanded internationally, broadened its platform and strengthened its executive team

KnowBe4, the global leader in digital workforce security, securing both humans and AI agents, today announced strong business momentum in 2026, with AI-related ARR growing more than 35% so far this year, driven by AIDA (Artificial Intelligence Defense Agents), the launch of the new SAT Advanced offer and growth in the email and collaboration security portfolio, along with international markets expanding at a double-digit rate.

The company's growth has remained organic, fueled by product innovation and expansion across its installed base of over 70,000 customers. KnowBe4 is broadening its platform to address the security risks posed as AI agents become part of everyday work.

"The nature of the workforce is changing rapidly. As organizations deploy AI agents alongside employees, they need security strategies that address both," said Bryan Palma, CEO at KnowBe4. "We've spent the past year expanding KnowBe4 from a leader in security awareness training into a broader digital workforce security platform, while continuing to invest in the people, products, and the global infrastructure needed to support our customers as their needs evolve."

Attack Simulation and Training

KnowBe4 continued to invest in the core of its platform in 2026, expanding how it tests and coaches employees against the ways attackers target them:

• SAT Advanced: Launched in May as part of a new two-tier Security Awareness Training lineup, SAT Advanced pairs KnowBe4's full training content library with AIDA, giving customers deeper personalization and reporting alongside the SAT Foundation tier. The strong customer adoption of SAT Advanced has contributed to the company's double digit growth.
• Real-Time Coaching: Launched in August, it delivers a bite-sized security tip the moment risky behavior occurs, giving employees proactive, in-the-moment coaching rather than after-the-fact training alone.
• Simulated Vishing: Launched this month, the capability extends attack simulation beyond email to voice-based social engineering, reflecting how attackers increasingly reach employees by phone.

Email and Collaboration Security

As cybercriminals increasingly launch attacks through collaboration tools, phone calls and other channels beyond email alone, KnowBe4 extended its protection to the platforms where employees now communicate and work:

• Securing Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Teams is a communications channel where cybercriminals are more frequently intervening to launch malicious attacks. Introduced in May, the capability extends phishing defense into the environment where employees communicate and collaborate.
• Behavioral Intelligence: A proprietary data moat built on 16 years of phishing simulations and user interaction data across 70,000+ organizations. Processing 1.15 billion event signals daily, this dataset maps exact employee risk behaviors and human psychology across every major industry.
• Portfolio Growth: The email and collaboration security portfolio was a key driver of the company's AI-related revenue growth for 2026, reflecting rising customer demand for protection that spans inbound threat detection, outbound loss prevention and incident response.

AI Innovation and Agent Security

As AI agents take on increasingly autonomous roles inside enterprises, KnowBe4 is extending its platform to help organizations understand, monitor and govern agent behavior alongside human behavior:

• A Decade of AI Innovation: 2026 marks the tenth anniversary of the beta version of AIDA, a milestone that reinforces KnowBe4's position as one of the industry's earliest providers training both humans and agents.
• AIDA Orchestration: The agent cuts the time required for personalized security training administration from hours to seconds. In early deployments, organizations using AIDA orchestration reduced their Risk Score by 10% and reached that reduction four times faster than with human-led programs alone.
• Agent Risk Manager: Announced in April, the product gives organizations visibility into AI agent behavior and helps them monitor and govern it, addressing the challenge of giving agents enough autonomy to do useful work while keeping that activity under control.
• Content Creation Agent: Announced in May as part of AIDA and leveraging generative AI and natural language prompting, the Custom Creation Agent turns an organization's internal policies and materials into bespoke training experiences.
• Agent Risk Manager Extension: Announced in August, KnowBe4 extended its agent governance capabilities to Anthropic's Claude, building on existing support for Microsoft Copilot. The expansion gives security teams visibility into agent activity and helps detect threats across multiple AI environments.

Measurable Risk Reduction and Behavior Change

Security leaders rely on evidence that their investments are reducing risk, and KnowBe4's latest research shows the measurable impact of sustained behavioral change. Its 2026 Phishing by Industry Benchmarking Report analyzed 42 million simulated phishing tests across 14.8 million users at 64,000 organizations worldwide. While phishing attacks increased 17.1% from the second half of 2025, organizations using ongoing security awareness training reduced average phishing susceptibility from 33.2% at baseline to 4.2% after one year.

The findings reinforce a shift in customer expectations: security awareness is increasingly being measured not by how many employees completed a training course, but by whether organizations can demonstrate sustained changes in behavior and reductions in human risk.

International Expansion Accelerates

KnowBe4 recorded healthy double-digit ARR growth across international markets over the past year.

The company is also expanding its regional presence by growing its teams and investing in local expertise across Asia. Recent cloud email security engagements in Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines reflect growing demand for security solutions that address inbound threat detection, outbound loss prevention and incident response automation for both email and collaboration tools.

A Leadership Team Built to Scale

The company has also strengthened its leadership team to continue scaling the business. Recent appointments and promotions have added experienced leaders across finance, technology, content, people, go-to-market and customer operations:

• Yuneeb Khan, chief financial officer: Appointed in February to lead KnowBe4's worldwide finance organization, Khan brings more than 30 years of global experience across public and private companies, including periods of rapid scaling and transformation.
• Kelly Morgan, chief customer officer: Appointed in February to scale the company's global customer organization, Morgan brings more than 20 years of experience leading customer success and post-sale teams. Morgan's arrival was followed in July by the appointments of Marc LeCours as SVP of global customer services, Zahra Soonasra as SVP of global customer success management and Steve Asma as VP of global support.
• Veena Bricker, chief human resources officer: Appointed in March to lead global people strategy, Bricker brings more than 30 years of experience across technology and private-equity-backed organizations, supporting KnowBe4's continued organizational growth.
• Fran Roberts, general manager, KnowBe4 Studios: Appointed in June to lead the Studios team, Roberts brings more than 20 years of content and technology leadership and is driving KnowBe4's AI-forward training content, from interactive games to immersive storytelling.
• Andrew Kanzer, chief growth officer: Appointed in August to lead global go-to-market strategy, Kanzer brings more than two decades of experience scaling software organizations and is focused on accelerating growth and expanding KnowBe4's channel reach.
• Kurt Mills, channel chief: Appointed in September to head the evolution of KnowBe4's global partner programs, operations and channel routes to market, Mills brings over 25 years helping organizations reimagine their channel strategy as a core driver of revenue, aligning partner programs with corporate vision and long-term growth goals.

Industry Recognition

KnowBe4's momentum has also been reflected in continued recognition from customers, analysts, industry organizations and governments.

The company was ranked #1 in G2's 2026 Summer Grid Report for Security Awareness Training for the sixth consecutive year and was also recognized in G2's Incident Response category for PhishER and PhishER Plus. KnowBe4 earned Frost & Sullivan's 2026 Global Customer Value Leadership Recognition in the email security industry, while AIDA received a 2026 Fortress Cybersecurity Award. The company was also recognized with the UK National Technology Award for Security Innovation of the Year and achieved ISO/IEC 42001 certification, demonstrating its commitment to the responsible development, deployment and use of AI systems.

In September, KnowBe4 received accreditation from Italy's Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale (ACN), the country's national cybersecurity authority. The accreditation allows KnowBe4 to support Italian public sector organizations, critical infrastructure providers and enterprises with training solutions backed by the Italian government.

KnowBe4 also marked its ninth annual KB4-CON user conference in Orlando this year and will bring the event to Japan for the first time this November, reflecting the growing global reach of its customer community.