Dutch cybersecurity startup Dawnguard lands €2.8 million for AI-native security architecture automation

Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Dawnguard has announced the public launch of its security architecture automation platform, alongside an additional €2.8 million ($3.3 million) in pre-Seed funding.

The round came from existing investor BNVT Capital in the UK, with new participation from Curiosity VC in the Netherlands and eCAPITAL in Germany. According to the company, the fresh capital brings Dawnguard’s total funding to more than €5.5 million ($6.3 million).

This comes one year after they emerged from stealth with €2.6 million in pre-Seed funding – as covered by EU-Startups.

“Cybersecurity has become trapped in an endless cycle of detection, response, and patching,” says Mahdi Abdulrazak, CEO and co-founder of Dawnguard. “For twenty years, security was something you added later. That model was already fragile. Today, against an attacker running at machine speed, it becomes increasingly indefensible. When probing is continuous and cheap, the only thing that holds is what was designed correctly from the start.”

Dawnguard’s additional pre-Seed round comes amid continued 2026 activiy of European companies working on cybersecurity automation, AI-agent security, cloud infrastructure security, software supply-chain protection and adjacent digital identity infrastructure.

Relevant rounds reported this year include Cloudsmith’s €61.5 million Series C for AI-driven software supply-chain security, Geordie AI’s €25 million Series A for AI-agent governance, NeuralTrust’s €17.2 million Seed round for enterprise AI-agent security, Escape’s €15.4 million Series A for offensive security engineering, and Cloudgeni’s €858k raise for secure cloud infrastructure automation.

In the Netherlands, Amsterdam-based Duna raised €30 million for AI-native business identity and onboarding, an adjacent trust-infrastructure segment.

Taken together, adjacent 2026 rounds represent approximately €224 million in funding, indicating active investor interest in security tooling that moves beyond reactive monitoring towards earlier-stage design, governance, identity and infrastructure controls.

“Every engineering team understands the gap between what was designed and what ultimately gets deployed,” adds Kim van Lavieren, CTO and co-founder of Dawnguard. “That gap is where risk lives. Dawnguard closes the distance between intent and reality by turning architecture into enforceable code, continuously validating that systems remain aligned with their original security design. Security should not exist in documents, spreadsheets, or diagrams. It should exist in the systems themselves.”

Founded in 2025 by CEO Mahdi Abdulrazak and CTO Kim van Lavieren, Dawnguard is building an AI-native cybersecurity platform designed to help organisations design, build, and operate secure cloud-native systems from the very beginning.

The founders have experience across IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and military cyber operations – positioning the company around a shift away from reactive cybersecurity and compliance box-ticking, towards a model where resilience is built into systems before they reach production.

The company’s focus is security architecture automation: turning secure architecture into deployable infrastructure, validating designs before deployment, generating production-ready Infrastructure as Code, and continuously checking that cloud environments remain aligned with approved security designs.

The launch marks Dawnguard’s move from enterprise design partnerships into general availability, following a year of platform development and customer validation. The startup also announced the opening of its New York City office as part of its broader international expansion plans.

The problem Dawnguard is addressing is increasingly visible across modern software teams. As AI-assisted engineering accelerates how quickly software is designed, written, and shipped, security teams are being asked to protect systems that are more complex, more dynamic, and increasingly influenced by AI-generated code and autonomous workflows.

Traditional tools often detect problems after systems are already built, while many breaches still originate from architectural weaknesses, insecure configurations, and design decisions that cannot easily be patched away.

Dawnguard calls this new environment the Mythos Era: a period in which software evolves and can be exploited faster than traditional security processes can keep up. In this context, the startup argues that cloud security needs to begin at the drawing board, not after deployment.

Its platform gives engineering and security teams a shared architecture workspace, where cloud architectures can be designed, validated, translated into enforceable infrastructure, and checked continuously as systems evolve. The aim is to reduce the gap between security intent and operational reality, helping teams prevent insecure patterns from entering production in the first place.

The new funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand Dawnguard’s AI-driven architecture intelligence, strengthen its enterprise go-to-market strategy, and support international growth.

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