Enterprise

Belgium’s Aikido lands $17M Series A for its ‘no BS’ security platform aimed at developers

Comment

Aikido Founders
Image Credits: Aikido

Developers have a problem. It used to be the case that only large enterprises needed to worry themselves with security, but today, every startup is capable of holding huge amounts of customer data. That means developers across the board have to worry about how secure their platform is, and they often find themselves grappling with complicated tools to manage security.

Now, Aikido, a small startup in Ghent, Belgium, thinks it has an answer to that dilemma: A no-nonsense, open source, developer-facing security platform. And the startup has just raised a $17 million Series A to further build out its product.

“There have been security tools for three decades, but I think we’re the first where the buyer is the user. With other tools, the CSO is the buyer, but then some poor developer is the user. We are the ‘no BS’ platform,” Aikido’s founder and CTO, Willem Delbare, told TechCrunch.

He has a point.

Aikido’s main competitors tend to make tools that are aimed at larger enterprises than the people who actually have to deploy the tools. Enterprise platform Snyk, for example, used to resemble Aikido, but pivoted to larger firms some time ago. Other competitors include JIT, which caters to small-to-mid market customers. In the middle market, you have Endor Labs and Guardrails, and then you have larger companies like Mend, Qwiet, Oxeye, Ox, Arnica and Apiiro.

Delbare told me that Aikido’s main differentiators are that it has a freemium model and it actively open sources new products. “This makes us flexible, fast and affordable,” he said.

The company also offers all-in-one security, flat pricing and a lot less notifications. “We only bother developers when something ‘real’ is wrong. We aggressively triage alerts to cut noise and false-positives,” he said.

That logic seems to have worked fairly well: The company already has 3,000 small-to-midsize customers. And this Series A, led by European venture firm Singular, comes less than six months after the company raised a $5 million seed round. The company has now raised a total of $22.5 million.

Another aspect that sets Aikido apart is that it’s based in Ghent. The security industry is dominated by Israeli and U.S. incumbents, and their veterans (the security industry’s version of the “PayPal Mafia” is called “the Checkpoint Mafia“).

Delbare said there’s a certain “playbook” that U.S. or Israeli security startups follow: “They take a very technically advanced security feature, become really good at it, raise a ton of cash, and then two years later, get bought by Palo Alto Networks or Cisco. And then they just repeat that playbook over and over.”

He stressed that Aikido doesn’t follow that pattern. “We’re not doing that kind of playbook. We’re not one single feature. If we ever get bought, it will just be for our customer base and the revenue. Not for a platform that fixes a feature gap,” he said.

“These tools basically look like the inside of an F-16’s cockpit. They make you feel dumb. A developer just wants to fix problems and move on with building fun features, right?” Delbare explained.

Delbare said Aikido decided to go with Singular after meeting its partner, Henri Tilloy. “I think he’s the first VC I’ve talked to in a long time who actually understood the product. Most VCs look at your company and they just see a spreadsheet,” he said.

For his part, Tilloy said in a statement: “Aikido has an incredibly pragmatic and unique approach to security. It’s simple, easy to setup and use for developers; yet it ticks of the boxes of their compliance and security requirements in one go.”

Also in the team are co-founders Roeland Delrue (CRO and COO) and Felix Garriau (CMO). The company has brought on Madeline Lawrence, who left her role as a partner at Peak VC to join the startup as its chief brand officer. She told me: “Willem and I go years back. He was a fund scout and frequent angel co-investor. We grew close because Willem is someone that ‘tells it like it is.’ That same attitude defines Aikido: security that gets to the point. It gives this team a cutting edge in an established tight-nit industry – I love edge.”

The round also saw participation from Notion Capital and Connect Ventures, both of which co-led the previous seed round.

Aikido is tackling a large market. The network security software market is expected to increase from $24.21 billion in 2023 to $27.33 billion in 2024.

At the same time, security risks are mutating and growing rapidly, with the average cost of a data breach reaching record highs of $4.45 million in 2023, according to UpGuard.

More TechCrunch

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android

A hacker listed the data allegedly breached from Samco on a known cybercrime forum.

Hacker claims theft of India’s Samco account data

A top European privacy watchdog is investigating following the recent breaches of Dell customers’ personal information, TechCrunch has learned.  Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to…

Ireland privacy watchdog confirms Dell data breach investigation

Ampere and Qualcomm aren’t the most obvious of partners. Both, after all, offer Arm-based chips for running data center servers (though Qualcomm’s largest market remains mobile). But as the two…

Ampere teams up with Qualcomm to launch an Arm-based AI server

At Google’s I/O developer conference, the company made its case to developers — and to some extent, consumers — why its bets on AI are ahead of rivals. At the…

Google I/O was an AI evolution, not a revolution

TechCrunch Disrupt has always been the ultimate convergence point for all things startup and tech. In the bustling world of innovation, it serves as the “big top” tent, where entrepreneurs,…

Meet the Magnificent Six: A tour of the stages at Disrupt 2024

There’s apparently a lot of demand for an on-demand handyperson. Khosla Ventures and Pear VC have just tripled down on their investment in Honey Homes, which offers up a dedicated…

Khosla Ventures, Pear VC triple down on Honey Homes, a smart way to hire a handyman

TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select…

TikTok tests 60-minute video uploads as it continues to take on YouTube

Flock Safety is a multibillion-dollar startup that’s got eyes everywhere. As of Wednesday, with the company’s new Solar Condor cameras, those eyes are solar-powered and use wireless 5G networks to…

Flock Safety’s solar-powered cameras could make surveillance more widespread

Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate. His family was involved in all types of real estate projects, from ground-up…

Agora raises $34M Series B to keep building the Carta for real estate

Poshmark, the social commerce site that lets people buy and sell new and used items to each other, launched a paid marketing tool on Thursday, giving sellers the ability to…

Poshmark’s ‘Promoted Closet’ tool lets sellers boost all their listings at once

Google is launching a Gemini add-on for educational institutes through Google Workspace.

Google adds Gemini to its Education suite

More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over…

YC-backed Recall.ai gets $10M Series A to help companies use virtual meeting data

Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collab with teammates — so they launched a startup, CoLab, to build a better way. The…

CoLab’s collaborative tools for engineers line up $21M in new funding

Reddit announced on Wednesday that it is reintroducing its awards system after shutting down the program last year. The company said that most of the mechanisms related to awards will…

Reddit reintroduces its awards system

Sigma Computing, a startup building a range of data analytics and business intelligence tools, has raised $200 million in a fresh VC round.

Sigma is building a suite of collaborative data analytics tools