Dawnguard Emerges out of Stealth Mode with $3 Million to Re-Engineer Cybersecurity in the AI Era

Dawnguard, an AI-powered cloud architecture for rapid and secure design validation, led by Kim van Lavieren(Co-Founder and CTO), Mahdi Abdulrazak(Co-Founder and CEO), and others, has emerged from stealth with $3 million in pre-seed funding led by 9900 Capital and a group of angel investors, from scale-up founders to experienced CIOs and CISOs. Dawnguard will use the funding to grow its engineering team, expand enterprise integrations, and scale platform deployment across production environments.

Dawnguard is creating a new cybersecurity category by embedding security directly into system architecture—enabling secure, compliant, and scalable design from the start, rather than retrofitting it in production.

Dawnguard takes a holistic, collaborative approach to cybersecurity, giving engineering and security teams a shared workspace to design secure, compliant architectures that also optimize for cost, resilience, and sustainability. Founded to fix a reactive, outdated security model, the company is led by Mahdi Abdulrazak and Kim van Lavieren—veterans from the military, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon—with deep expertise at the intersection of security, AI, and cloud.

Dawnguard is redefining shift-left security by embedding it directly into system architecture from day one. Its AI-driven platform helps security architects, DevOps, and cloud teams validate infrastructure designs pre-deployment, generate secure Infrastructure as Code, and enforce security continuously to eliminate drift. Purpose-built for cloud-native environments, Dawnguard aims to close the gap between fast-moving AI development and secure infrastructure—creating a new operating model for trust at scale.