Builders have an issue. It was once the case that solely giant enterprises wanted to fret themselves with safety, however immediately, each startup is able to holding large quantities of buyer information. Meaning builders throughout the board have to fret about how safe their platform is, they usually typically discover themselves grappling with difficult instruments to handle safety.

Now, Aikido, a small startup in Ghent, Belgium, thinks it has a solution to that dilemma: A no-nonsense, open-source, developer-facing safety platform. And the startup has simply raised a $17 million Sequence A to additional construct out its product.

“There have been safety instruments for 3 a long time, however I feel we’re the primary the place the client is the person. With different instruments, the CSO is the client, however then some poor developer is the person. We’re the ‘no BS’ platform,” Aikido’s founder and CTO, Willem Delbare, advised TechCrunch.

He has a degree.

Aikido’s principal rivals are inclined to make instruments which might be geared toward bigger enterprises than the individuals who truly should deploy the instruments. Enterprise platform Snyk, for instance, used to resemble Aikido, however pivoted to bigger corporations a while in the past. Different rivals embody JIT, which caters to small-to-mid market prospects. Within the center market, you’ve Endor Labs, Guardrails, after which you’ve bigger firms like Mend, Qwiet, Oxeye, Ox, Arnica and Apiiro .

Delbare advised me that Aikido’s principal differentiators are that it has a freemium mannequin and it actively open-sources new merchandise. “This makes us versatile, quick, and reasonably priced,” he stated.

The corporate additionally presents all-in-one safety, flat pricing, and quite a bit much less notifications. “We solely trouble builders when one thing ‘actual’ is incorrect. We aggressively triage alerts to chop noise and false-positives,” he stated.

That logic appears to have labored pretty nicely: The corporate already has 3,000 small-to-midsize prospects. And this Sequence A, led by European enterprise agency Singular, comes lower than 6 months after the corporate raised a $5 million seed spherical. The corporate has now raised a complete of $22.5 million.

One other side that units Aikido aside is that it’s based mostly in Ghent. The safety business is dominated by Israeli and U.S. incumbents, and their veterans (the safety business’s model of the ‘PayPal Mafia’ is named ‘the Checkpoint Mafia‘).

Delbare stated there’s a sure “playbook” that U.S. or Israeli safety startups comply with: “They take a really technically superior safety function, change into actually good at it, increase a ton of money, after which two years later, get purchased by Palo Alto Networks or Cisco. After which they only repeat that playbook again and again.”

He harassed that Aikido doesn’t comply with that sample. “We’re not doing that type of playbook. We’re not one single function. If we ever get purchased, it is going to simply be for our buyer base and the income. Not for a platform that fixes a function hole,” he stated.

“These instruments mainly appear to be the within of an F-16’s cockpit. They make you’re feeling dumb. A developer simply desires to repair issues and transfer on with constructing enjoyable options, proper?” Delbare defined.

Delbare stated Aikido determined to go along with Singular after assembly its associate, Henri Tilloy. “I feel he’s the primary VC I’ve talked to in a very long time who truly understood the product. Most VCs take a look at your organization they usually simply see a spreadsheet,” he stated.

Additionally within the staff are co-founders Roeland Delrue (CRO and COO), and Felix Garriau (CMO). The corporate has introduced on Madeline Lawrence, who left her position as a associate at Peak VC to hitch the startup as its chief model officer.

The spherical additionally noticed participation from Notion Capital and Join Ventures, each of which co-led the earlier seed spherical.

Aikido is tackling a big market. The community safety software program market is predicted to improve from $24.21 billion in 2023 to $27.33 billion in 2024.

On the identical time, safety dangers are mutating and rising quickly, with the typical value of a knowledge breach reaching document highs of $4.45 million in 2023, in keeping with Upguard.