Aikido Security

Willem Delbare, Roeland Delrue, and Felix Garriau founded Aikido Security in Ghent, Belgium in October 2022 with a specific complaint: existing security tools were built for CISOs, not for the developers who actually had to fix the problems. "These tools basically look like the inside of an F-16's cockpit," Delbare said. "They make you feel dumb. A developer just wants to fix problems and move on with building fun features." The company's name comes from the Japanese martial art aikido — redirecting an attacker's force rather than meeting it head-on. The approach to security was similar: reduce noise, surface only what matters, and let developers fix vulnerabilities as part of their normal workflow.

Aikido's differentiators were conceptual before they were technical. The platform was the first major security tool where the buyer and the user were the same person — the developer. It offered a freemium model, open-sourced new products aggressively, charged flat pricing rather than per-seat, and aggressively triaged alerts to eliminate false positives. "We only bother developers when something 'real' is wrong," Delbare said. The company raised €2 million in pre-seed funding in January 2023, then €5 million in seed funding in November 2023 from Notion Capital and Connect Ventures. By mid-2024, it had 3,000 small-to-medium enterprise customers.

Aikido raised $17 million in a Series A led by Singular in May 2024. In January 2025, the company co-launched Opengrep — an open-source fork of Semgrep, a widely used code analysis tool — as a community alternative to proprietary code scanning. Then in three months across late 2025, Aikido made three acquisitions: Trag (AI code review), Allseek, and Haicker, adding automated penetration testing capabilities under the name "Aikido Attack." The acquisition spree transformed Aikido from a vulnerability detection tool into a full application security platform.

Aikido recorded revenue growth of 1,531% in the financial year ending January 2025, according to data submitted to Sifted — placing it second on the Sifted Future 50 list of Europe's fastest-growing startups. The company's customer base nearly tripled in a year. Customers included Niantic, Revolut, SoundCloud, and the English Premier League. Revenue from the United States accounted for approximately half of total revenue. DST Global — early backer of Meta, Spotify, and Alibaba — led a $60 million Series B in January 2026 at a $1 billion valuation, making Aikido the fastest European cybersecurity company ever to achieve unicorn status.

Aikido's timing was not accidental. Cursor, Lovable, and dozens of other vibe-coding tools were writing billions of lines of code, but AI-generated code introduced security vulnerabilities at a scale human-written code never had — because the AI was fast but not cautious. Aikido positioned itself as the natural guardrail for AI-written code: a security layer that scanned code before it went to production, identifying vulnerabilities that neither the AI tool nor the developer had caught. "You could see it as guardrails for writing secure software, especially when you're using AI," Delbare told Reuters. The company had headquarters in Ghent and offices in San Francisco, London, and Chicago.