Dawnguard launches with $3M in pre-seed funding

AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands — Dawnguard, a cybersecurity startup, has emerged from stealth with $3 million from a pre-seed funding round was by 9900 Capital.

The funds will be used to expand Dawnguard’s engineering team, deepen enterprise integrations, and bring its platform to broader production use. Rather than bolting on security in production, Dawnguard embeds it at the core of system architecture — ensuring secure, compliant, and scalable designs from the earliest phases of development.

The founding team, led by CEO Mahdi Abdulrazak and CTO Kim van Lavieren, is composed of industry veterans from military and big tech companies like IBM, Microsoft and Amazon, with decades of experience running large-scale security programs and with unique experience at the intersection of security, AI, and cloud.

“Our industry treats security as a checkbox. It’s broken,” said Mahdi Abdulrazak, CEO of Dawnguard. “We built Dawnguard because security needs to be part of the system’s DNA from the start, not an afterthought. This is about aligning intent with reality, and giving teams the tools to enforce that alignment at the earliest stage and long after deployment.”

The company is building various AI/ML-driven engines that integrate across the entire IT landscape to spot issues in the design phase, adapt to evolving environments, and make security native. The platform is designed for security architects, DevOps engineers, and cloud teams. At its core, Dawnguard is a security architecture automation platform purpose-built for cloud-native environments. It helps teams validate cloud infrastructure designs before deployment, automatically generate production-ready Infrastructure as Code (IaC) from validated designs, and continuously enforce security posture after deployment to eliminate drift.

“Dawnguard closes the gap between design and reality,” said Kim van Lavieren. “We’re giving teams the power to translate security intent into enforceable code so they don’t have to rely on spreadsheets, static docs, or guesswork.”

The company plans to expand its platform to support more dynamic environments, close the security gap between “vibe coding” and the infrastructure where GenAI coded applications run, and deliver a new operating model for building trust at scale.

“With software moving faster than ever, security can’t be stuck in the past,” Abdulrazak said. “We’re creating the platform that makes secure architecture not just possible, but inevitable.”