Cybersecurity startup Dawnguard has emerged from stealth with $3 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by 9900 Capital and a group of angel investors. The funds will be used to expand Dawnguard’s engineering team, deepen enterprise integrations, and bring its platform to broader production use.
“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.”
Rather than just scanning deployments or automating reviews, Dawnguard provides a shared canvas for engineering and security teams to collaborate on secure, compliant architecture that also balances cost, resilience, and sustainability. The founding team, led by 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.
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.
“Dawnguard closes the gap between design and reality,” said 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 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 generates production-ready Infrastructure as Code (IaC) from validated designs, and continuously enforces a secure posture after deployment to eliminate drift.
“Hundreds of security tools overwhelm CISOs with promises of better detection, yet few tackle the root issue: design flaws in code that AI-driven threats exploit. As attacks grow smarter, defences must shift left—embedding resilience at the codebase. We are excited to back Dawnguard, who build protection by design, not patch by necessity,” said Chris Corbishley, managing partner at 9900 Capital.
