Company: Aikido Security
Founder: Roeland Delrue (COO), Willem Delbare (CEO), Felix Garriau (CMO) qne Madeline Lawrence (CGO)
Website: https://www.aikido.dev/
About Aikido
Founded in Ghent, Belgium in late 2022, Aikido Security is building self-securing software for modern development teams. Its unified security platform secures application testing, code, cloud and runtime, helping teams to reduce risk without slowing down development. Aikido is the fastest-ever European cybersecurity company to reach unicorn status, reaching a $1 billion valuation on a $60 million Series B earlier this year, and is trusted by over 150,000 teams, with a global customer base including SoundCloud, Niantic, Runway, Handshake, Deel, the Premier League, MontBlanc and Revolut.
Over the past year, the company has grown through a run of acquisitions, starting with AI code-review startup Trag, as Aikido set out to build the industry’s first unified platform spanning code quality, application security, cloud security and penetration testing.
In September 2025 it made a double acquisition of two AI-native security teams: Allseek, the same team that manually penetration tested Aikido two years earlier, and Haicker, led by 2024’s #1 ranked competitive hacker, Philippe Dourassov. Together they transform weeks-long pen tests into sub-hour automated assessments, enabling Aikido to capture the $6 billion penetration testing market. Aikido’s AI agents divide and conquer, mapping the environment, exploiting vulnerabilities and validating which pose real threats.
In June 2026, Aikido acquired Root, the first agentic platform that automates vulnerability fixes across container images and application dependencies, for $70 million. Aikido Libraries, powered by Root’s technology, lets teams patch a vulnerability without being impacted by breaking changes, generating hundreds of verified patches a day. Alongside the deal, Aikido announced an industry first: backporting fixes for critical, actively exploited open-source vulnerabilities to the community rather than keeping them behind a paywall.
In September 2026 it acquired Poland-based Cyberly, which brought AI-driven attack simulations and AI usage visibility and protected more than 300,000 employees across 200-plus organisations, and Belgium-based Outkept, which brought email security and phishing awareness training to more than 1,000 organisations and 250,000 users across 100-plus countries. On 20 October 2026 those two became Noon, a dedicated workforce security business extending Aikido’s protection beyond software to the people using it. Noon brings email protection, device protection, AI visibility and security awareness training into one platform, simulating the attacks employees actually face, including deepfake voice calls, SMS, QR codes and multi-step campaigns.
Aikido’s research team has also been first to flag several of the past year’s major open-source incidents, including the Shai Hulud worm’s resurgence across 19,000+ repositories, the CanisterWorm npm campaign linked to a Kubernetes wiper, the PromptPwnd prompt injection flaw in CI/CD pipelines, and the active npm attack that compromised packages used by Deliveroo and Qlik.
Aikido was founded because its co-founders were frustrated by outdated cybersecurity tools and set out to fix security for developers once and for all – tackling the alert fatigue and tool sprawl that left teams drowning in false positives, a pen testing market where tests start at $10,000 and happen twice a year, and an open-source ecosystem where the only options were to upgrade and break your application or migrate to a vendor’s locked-down replacement. Its impact has been to prove that “no bullshit” security sells: a developer-first platform that unifies code, cloud, protection and attack testing, sub-hour autonomous pen testing, hundreds of verified patches a day, and backported fixes returned to the open-source community rather than kept behind a paywall – all in service of a vision of self-securing software that continuously tests, validates and improves itself as software is built and released.
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