Aikido security

Main service(s)

Aikido Security is a product company. It offers a comprehensive tool to address the multifaceted aspects of application and cloud security. The product covers several security aspects, consolidates findings and invests considerable effort to reduce the number of false positives often present in security tooling.

A difficult part of securing an online software product is the many different aspects involved. In the technical domain, one has to consider static source code analysis (SAST), software component analysis (SCA), container scanning, secrets detection, dynamic application security testing (DAST), just to name a few. Many of these aspects have their own dedicated tooling, leading to multiple pain points.

The software building organisation has to:

• Research, select and buy various security solutions to construct a comprehensive technical security toolchain.
• Managing these various components and keeping them functional.
• Consolidating the findings and removing false positives.

Aikido Security builds on various (best-in-class) open-source point solutions. It provides an easy-to-use interface to manage these solutions and consolidate findings. Aikido Security put considerable effort into building a management layer to minimise false positives by (1) deduplicating findings, (2) performing reachability analysis and (3) making it easy for customers to provide context while triaging, such as marking irrelevant paths or packages.

The above approach streamlines a lot of the application and security work, leading to significant time gain and less wasted effort. This is especially interesting for organisations with issues scaling security or where there is not that much security knowledge yet. Unsurprisingly, these types of organisations constitute the majority of the current customer base.

For organisations with more security maturity and existing tooling, Aikido Security provides the opportunity to still connect to and use their management and consolidation layer. This way, organisations that already have fine-tuned tools in place can still take advantage of the consolidation and minimisation of findings.

Differentiators

Opinionated and broad scope

Aikido Security has selected multiple open-source security tools and combines these in a broader security solution. Customers don’t have to spend time researching and selecting tools.

Significant time savings and less wasted effort

Security tools are often built with a “gotta catch them all” mindset, which leads to many false positives and low-severity issues. Aikido Security again takes an opinionated approach and tries to minimise the false positives, consolidate issues and mostly show significant issues.

Attractive pricing plan

Commercial tooling is often geared towards the enterprise market, with its associated high-ticket prices. Aikido Security has a lower pricing structure and even a free plan, making it easy to try the tooling. Free users usually convert into paying customers after a “critical event” (such as a customer requiring certain security assurances).

Future plans

After raising its 5 million seed round in November 2023, Aikido Security is doubling its team in 2024. The round will be used to improve the product (engineering roles) and grow the sales team.

Company history

Aikido Security was founded by Felix Garriau, Amber Rucker, Roeland Delrue and Willem Delbare.

The idea was born out of a pain the founders felt at their previous companies: (application) security seemed to require buying and setting up multiple tools and wasting a lot of time on false positives.

After validating the idea for Aikido Security with 50 potential buyers, the team decided to start the company in the summer of 2022.

In November 2022, Aikido Security raised a €2 million pre-seed from various business angels.

In January 2023, Aikido Security released its beta version. The first paying customers quickly followed. In November 2023, Aikido Security raised a €5 million seed round.