Dawnguard goes public as it closes $6.3m round
July 1, 2026



Dawnguard, founded by cybersecurity veterans from IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and military cyber operations, has announced the public launch of its security architecture automation platform, making it available to organisations looking to design, build, and operate secure cloud-native systems from day zero through production.

The launch marks the company’s move from enterprise design partnerships into general availability, following a year of platform development and customer validation. Alongside the product launch, Dawnguard announced the opening of its New York City office and an additional $3.3 million (€2.9m) in pre-seed funding from existing investor BNVT Capital in the UK, with new participation from Curiosity VC in the Netherlands and eCAPITAL in Germany. The new capital brings Dawnguard’s total funding to more than $6.3 million.


“Cybersecurity has become trapped in an endless cycle of detection, response, and patching,” said 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.”

The rise of AI, autonomous systems, and increasingly complex digital infrastructure has created what Dawnguard calls the Mythos Era: an environment where software evolves and is exploited faster than traditional security processes can keep pace. Security teams are overwhelmed by thousands of alerts, fragmented tooling, and endless patch cycles, while attackers increasingly exploit weaknesses embedded in architecture itself.

Dawnguard was built for this shift. Its platform turns secure architecture into deployable infrastructure, enabling organisations to:

Design secure and compliant cloud architectures before deployment
Automatically generate production-ready Infrastructure as Code
Continuously validate that deployed environments remain aligned with approved designs
Eliminate security drift between architectural intent and operational reality
Enable engineering and security teams to collaborate within a shared architecture workspace
The platform is designed to eliminate the gap between security intent and operational reality. Engineering and security teams work in a shared architecture workspace where designs can be validated, translated into enforceable infrastructure, and checked continuously as systems evolve.

“Every engineering team understands the gap between what was designed and what ultimately gets deployed,” added 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.”