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

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.

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.

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