A unique position in cybersecurity. Things are moving fast for the Ghent-based start-up
$1 billion after just three years! Aikido Security is one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity companies to achieve unicorn status worldwide, and the fastest in Europe.
“We didn’t create Aikido Security because we thought the world needed yet another security product. We created it because we were developers ourselves and we were tired of suffering security instead of mastering it!”
The tone is set. As Willem Delbare, CEO & CTO of Aikido Security, reminds us every day: “Devs just want to get back to creating interesting features!”
Founded in Ghent in 2022 by Willem Delbare, Roeland Delrue, and Felix Garriau, Aikido Security develops a security platform used by 25,000 organizations worldwide. Its international clientele includes the Premier League, Revolut, SoundCloud, and Niantic, among others.
With a team of 130 employees in 19 countries, Aikido Security designs developer-focused security products with a vision of self-securing software. Its platform secures code, the cloud, and the runtime environment, enabling teams to reduce risk without slowing down development. The success was immediate. A month ago, Aikido Security won the Flemish Government Award for Scale-up of the Year.
Unified platform
Today, Aikido Security is raising $60 million from investors led by DST Global, a technology-focused private equity firm. Its valuation has surpassed the billion-dollar mark, making it one of the first new European unicorns of 2026!
This is a major milestone. Aikido, which had raised $24 million before the latest round of financing, saw its revenue increase fivefold last year , with about half coming from the United States. Its customer base has nearly tripled.
The company’s strength lies in its unified platform. Aikido Security combines code security, cloud security, real-time protection, and autonomous penetration testing on a single platform. Its proprietary AI reduces noise by 95%, offers one-click fixes, and saves developers more than 10 hours per week.
A safeguard for writing secure software
It’s the security solution chosen by developers, praised by security teams, and trusted by decision-makers.
“Aikido focuses on developers. The product is really intended for people who write software,” comments Willem Delbare. “It could be considered a safeguard for writing secure software, especially when using AI.“
In this regard, last summer, Aikido acquired Trag, a company specializing in code quality, whose native AI engine understands code as written by AI. In doing so, Aikido has become the first platform capable of detecting AI-generated vulnerabilities at machine speed—a crucial asset in the face of the rapid rise of AI code generation in the industry.
