Mahdi Abdulrazak, CEO and co-founder of cyber security start-up Dawnguard , describes the current moment as the “Mythos Era”. At a time when artificial intelligence tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos make it child’s play to identify vulnerabilities in software and systems, cyber criminals are stepping up their activity.

“There is no longer any margin for error,” explains Abdulrazak. “The only way to defend yourself against malicious actors now making use of AI is to deploy security at the point of design and implementation; there is no room for mis-steps that need to be modified later.”

That’s where Dawnguard comes in. The Amsterdam-headquartered start-up, founded by cyber security veterans from IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and military cyber operations, has raised an additional $3.4 million of pre-seed funding as it seeks to scale its security architecture automation platform.

I first interviewed Dawnguard last summer , as the business unveiled its platform, offering tools that help developers to ensure new systems and software meet key security requirements before they’re deployed – and to enable continuous monitoring and updating post-deployment.

A year later, the company has continued to evolve its products and services and is this week revealing news of both the additional funding and the opening of an office in New York. Commercialization is also proceeding at pace. Dawnguard has reached this point through partnerships with around 15 large organisations that use its platform and provide feedback that underpins further development. Now the company is targeting the broader market with a fully paid-for product.

"Cybersecurity has become trapped in an endless cycle of detection, response, and patching," argues Abdulrazak. "For 20 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."

Still, that requires a high bar. Dawnguard promises to help customers design secure and compliant cloud architecture, and to automatically generate production-ready coding for for infrastructure. Once new systems are deployed, the platform continues to validate that the evolving environment remains aligned with the designs originally approved.

“Every engineering team understands the gap between what was designed and what ultimately gets deployed,” adds Kim van Lavieren, CTO and co-founder. “Security should not exist in documents, spreadsheets, or diagrams; it should exist in the systems themselves.”

The additional funding picked up by Dawnguard in recent months takes the total amount of investment raised by the business to around $6.4 million. The money comes from existing investor BNVT Capital in the UK, with new participation from Curiosity VC in the Netherlands and eCAPITAL in Germany. The funding will support a major expansion of the company’s go-to-market activity, particularly in the US following the opening of its New York office.

Regulated businesses in industries such as financial services represent a particular sweet spot for Dawnguard, because such firms are often required to meet tougher cyber security and resilience benchmarks – and to show they have done so. While regulation varies from one jurisdiction to another, Dawnguard is confident its platform’s tools can help regulated businesses meet those tests, though its targeting non-regulated enterprises too.

The founders can certainly point to relevant experience. Abdulrazak spent more than three decades working in cyber security roles before launching Dawnguard, while Van Lavieren is a former Royal Netherlands Navy offensive security specialist who has also served in roles at organisations including Amazon.

The key is for businesses to get on the front foot, both men stress – security embedded by design will always be stronger than an approach that relies on retrospective patches and upgrades, often rushed into production because a vulnerability has already been exploited.

“Customers are using Dawnguard to design new systems in a fraction of the time that it took before,” adds van Lavieren. “Indeed, they’re able to save cost and improve security at the same time, and that's something quite powerful that we haven't seen in traditional security.”