Today, we’re excited to announce Aikido has raised a $60M Series B at a $1B valuation, led by Tom Stafford at DST Global, with participation from PSG Equity, Singular, Notion Capital, and others.
It’s a big milestone for Aikido. And a meaningful one for Europe; we’re one of the fastest cybersecurity companies to reach unicorn status globally, and the fastest ever in Europe.
From "No Bullsh*t Security" to $1B in 3 years
We didn’t start Aikido because we thought the world needed another security product. We started it because we were developers ourselves, and we were tired of security being something that happened to us instead of something that helped us.
We were tired of tools that created noise instead of clarity, complexity instead of progress, and process instead of outcomes.
As Willem reminds us every day, “Developers just want to get back to building fun features.”
But too often, they can’t.
Instead, they’re forced to wade through a haystack of alerts, dashboards that look like the inside of an F-16 cockpit, and a barrage of four-letter acronyms developers are somehow expected to care about.
SAST. SCA. DAST. CSPM. CNAPP. IAC. RASP. ADR.
The list goes on. So do the vulnerabilities.
And the pressure keeps rising. Ship faster. Fix faster. Don’t break prod. Don’t ship risk. One day it’s worms in npm. Next it’s “vibe coding.” Then right on cue, Gartner invents another four-letter acronym your CISO suddenly has to worry about (and purchase).
Essentially, this is how engineers experience security today:
(Yes, this is an actual slide from our Series B pitch deck.)
Somehow, we’ve collectively accepted this as normal. We couldn’t.
Somewhere along the way, security drifted away from how software is actually built and operated– abstracted into quadrants, point tools, and snapshot reports that live far outside the reality of modern engineering teams. That disconnect is the real problem. Today, organizations spend billions on disjointed products that can’t talk to each other. Risk correlation becomes impossible; noise becomes the only consistent outcome. As vendors and analysts chase the next four-letter acronym, vulnerabilities that matter slip by unpatched or unseen entirely.
Why Aikido Exists
We built Aikido around a simple truth: Security begins and ends with better engineering.
That requires one unified platform to secure the entire software lifecycle, built for the people who actually ship software. That means bringing code, supply chain, cloud, runtime, and testing together so teams don’t need five vendors to answer one question: “are we actually at risk?"
Detection matters. But it’s not enough to get developers back to building. The magic comes when we close the loop. With full code and application context, Aikido automatically triages and remediates issues from the moment that vulnearbilities are generated to discovered in production.
Why Now: More Code, More Attacks, More pressure
Software is being built at a speed that would’ve felt impossible a few years ago. AI-generated code is the norm. Autonomous agents are writing and even changing systems faster than humans can review. The old model of “scan, alert, hope someone has time” was flawed already, and is now it is breaking in real time.
All the while, cyber attacks keep increasing (another up-and-to-the-right graph!), and regulations keep piling on. Security hasn’t been optional for a while, but now, neither is moving away from the old way of doing it.
As engineering evolves, security has to evolve with it. That’s why the next chapter matters.
Introducing Self-Securing Software
The next chapter is about self-securing software. Not security as a reactive activity with dashboards and manual weeks long testing. Rather, software that can secure itself on demand.
Our first major step towards this future was the recent release of Aikido Attack, AI penetration testing that delivers hacker creativity at machine speed. Aikido Attack works by deploying hundreds of specialised agents on demand to hunt vulnerabilities, validate exploits, and provide built-in remediation and retesting of findings to ensure fixes hold.
And yes, you can monitor it happening in real time:
Over time, this will evolve into continuous, autonomous testing built into every feature release, as part of the development lifecycle itself. Together, we will close the ship-test-and-fix loop, and free developers to get back to building entirely.
Aikido’s Unicorn Era (& a Big Moment for Europe!)
Today, Aikido is used by 100,000+ teams globally, including customers like the Premier League, SoundCloud, Niantic, and Revolut. Over the past year, we grew revenue 5x and more than tripled our customer base.
And we’re especially proud of what this milestone represents in Europe. In an industry dominated by Palo Alto and Tel Aviv heavyweights, Aikido shows that Europe can build a world-class software security company and win globally.
Because if we’re being honest: everything about Aikido “shouldn’t have worked.” European team. Based in a village. No cyber pedigree. Bottom-up model. Platform play. No CISO network.
But when you haven’t learned the industry rules, it’s easier to break them. And that outsider mentality is still our advantage. With no network to sell into in the industry, we had to no choice but to grow via inbound alone. With limitied budget and heavy weight incumbants, we had to figure out how to counterposition or die trying. With a freemium, developer-led GTM, we had to deliver real value to thousands of users every day, or else. Internally, we’ve built a team that reflects that same mindset: 180 people, 21+ former founders, deploying 60+ times a day.
And on that note, none of this happens without the thousands of teams who trusted us with their security and pushed us to build something better. Thank you.
We have a lot left to build. And we’re going to keep pushing until security finally works at the speed software demands – and developers deserve.
So, LFG. - Aikido.
A thank you to our investors:
This next chapter wouldn’t be possible without the continued support of our existing investors, including Notion Capital, Singular.vc, Syndicate One, Entourage, Connect Ventures, Innovia Capital, and the individuals who backed us early and stayed close along the way, including Christina Cacioppo (Vanta), Gilles Mattelin and Jorn Vanysacker (Henchman), Pieterjan Bouten (Showpad, Entourage), Louis Jonckheere (Wintercircus, Showpad), and Matthias Geeroms (Lighthouse).
We’re also excited to welcome new investors who are joining us for this chapter, including Mark Coucke and Alychlo, Joris Van Der Gucht (Silverfin), Ian Thiel (Sublime Security), Lorenz Bogaert (StarApps), Hendrik Isebaert (Showpad), Nik Storonsky (Revolut), VDK Bank, Dovesco, and PSG Equity.
Thank you for the trust, the challenge, and the long-term belief in what we’re building.
Secure your software now
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