Dam Secure, an AI security start-up building tools to protect enterprises from risks created by AI-generated code, has raised fresh funding as businesses accelerate the use of coding copilots and automated development workflows.
The company raised $4m in a seed round led by Washington, D.C.-based cyber and AI investor Paladin Capital Group.
Dam Secure is developing an AI-native platform designed to help organisations proactively manage the security issues that can emerge when large volumes of AI-written code are pushed into production. The founders argue that while the code may run as intended, it can still fail basic security expectations, particularly where the underlying business logic is flawed rather than obviously “buggy”.
The start-up’s approach centres on enabling security teams to set requirements in plain English and then enforce them automatically across large code bases during development. The firm gave an example of a policy such as “customer data must be encrypted at rest”, with the platform intended to apply those rules consistently as software is written and updated.
Dam Secure said the new capital will be used to accelerate product development and to expand go-to-market efforts throughout 2026. It added that it has already seen significant interest, with multiple customers across different industry verticals.
The seed round also brings Paladin Capital Managing Director Mourad Yesayan onto the company’s board, with Paladin saying it backed the founders based on their experience building security products inside fast-growing technology companies.
Dam Secure was founded by Patrick Collins and Simon Harloff. Collins is a former executive at Zip Payments and Secure Code Warrior and previously built and exited mobile technology company 5th Finger. Harloff has led product security teams at Zip Payments and Secure Code Warrior and is responsible for Dam Secure’s core technical architecture.
Dam Secure co-founder Patrick Collins said, “Enterprises are rushing to adopt AI to increase developer velocity, but the volume of software being produced is overwhelming traditional application security processes,” said Collins. “Existing security tools generate too much noise to work effectively in this new environment.”
He added, “Industry research shows that, when not explicitly constrained, large language models introduce vulnerabilities in up to half of generated code. This creates dangerous ‘logic gaps’ that organizations are largely blind to. We are already seeing the cost of this in recent billion-dollar heists and widespread ecosystem attacks. These breaches don’t rely on classic bugs, they exploit valid but flawed logic that existing ‘scan-and-patch’ tools simply cannot see,” continues Collins.
Paladin Capital managing director Mourad Yesayan said, “The current approach to application security is struggling to keep pace with generative AI,” Mr. Yesayan added. “Developers are becoming increasingly reliant on AI-generated code, and Dam Secure is focused on putting guardrails around that workflow.”
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