Dutch cybersecurity platform Dawnguard has emerged from stealth with €2.6 million in pre-Seed funding to increase their engineering crew, deepen enterprise integrations, and convey its platform to broader manufacturing use.
The spherical was led by 9900 Capital and a bunch of angel traders, from scale-up Founders to skilled CIOs and CISOs.
“Our business treats safety as a checkbox. It’s damaged,” stated Mahdi Abdulrazak, CEO of Dawnguard. “We constructed Dawnguard as a result of safety must be a part of the system’s DNA from the beginning, not an afterthought. That is about aligning intent with actuality, and giving groups the instruments to implement that alignment on the earliest stage and lengthy after deployment.”
Based in 2025, Dawnguard appears to be like to introduce a brand new cybersecurity class. Reasonably than bolting on safety in manufacturing, Dawnguard embeds it on the core of system structure – making certain safe, compliant, and scalable designs from the earliest phases of improvement.
The founding crew, led by CEO Mahdi Abdulrazak and CTO Kim van Lavieren, consists of business veterans from navy and massive tech corporations like IBM, Microsoft and Amazon, with a long time of expertise operating large-scale safety programmes and with expertise on the intersection of safety, AI, and cloud.
The platform is designed for safety architects, DevOps engineers, and cloud groups. Dawnguard is a safety structure automation platform purpose-built for cloud-native environments. It helps groups validate cloud infrastructure designs earlier than deployment, robotically generate production-ready Infrastructure as Code (IaC) from validated designs, and repeatedly implement safety posture after deployment to eradicate drift.
“Dawnguard closes the hole between design and actuality,” stated Kim van Lavieren. “We’re giving groups the facility to translate safety intent into enforceable code in order that they don’t must depend on spreadsheets, static docs, or guesswork.”
Dawnguard says it’s their holistic strategy that units it aside. Reasonably than simply scanning deployments or automating critiques, it reportedly supplies a shared canvas for engineering and safety groups to collaborate on safe, compliant structure that additionally balances price, resilience, and sustainability.
As an alternative of treating safety as an afterthought, Dawnguard says it embeds it instantly right into a system’s structure, from “day zero to day 10,000“. The corporate is constructing varied AI/ML-driven engines that combine throughout all the IT panorama to identify points within the design part, adapt to evolving environments, and make safety native.
“Dawnguard isn’t simply constructing tech – they’re rewriting the DNA of cybersecurity. In a world hooked on patching signs, they’ve chosen to re-engineer the basis. That’s not simply daring – it’s needed,” stated Dimitri van Zantvliet, Dutch Railways CISO & Chair Dutch CISO Neighborhood, and a Dawnguard investor and advisor.
Wanting forward, Dawnguard goals to reshape how the business embeds safety within the AI period. The corporate plans to increase its platform to assist extra dynamic environments, shut the safety hole between “vibe coding” and the infrastructure the place GenAI coded functions run, and ship a brand new working mannequin for constructing belief at scale.
“Lots of of safety instruments overwhelm CISOs with guarantees of higher detection, but few sort out the basis subject: design flaws in code that AI-driven threats exploit. As assaults develop smarter, defenses should shift left – embedding resilience on the codebase. We’re excited to again Dawnguard, who construct safety by design, not patch by necessity,” stated Chris Corbishley, Managing Accomplice 9900 Capital.
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