Dawnguard, an AI-native RegTech cybersecurity platform focused on secure-by-design cloud architecture, has raised $3.3m in new pre-seed funding as it moves its security architecture automation platform into general availability and accelerates its international expansion.
The round was led by existing investor BNVT Capital, with participation from Curiosity VC in the Netherlands and eCAPITAL in Germany. The latest funding brings Dawnguard’s total capital raised to more than $6.3m. Alongside the investment, the company has also opened a new office in New York City as it begins to scale its presence beyond Europe.
Dawnguard was founded by cybersecurity professionals with experience across IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and military cyber operations. The company said the new capital will support further development of its AI-driven architecture tooling and its international expansion strategy as it moves deeper into enterprise adoption.
Dawnguard operates at the intersection of cybersecurity and regulatory technology, offering an AI-native platform designed to embed security into the earliest stages of cloud architecture design. Its core focus is on enabling organisations to adopt “shift-left” security practices, where compliance and risk controls are integrated at the point of system design rather than after deployment.
The company is targeting what it sees as a widening gap in the security market, driven by the rapid acceleration of AI-assisted software development. As systems are built and deployed faster than ever, Dawnguard argues that traditional security models, which rely heavily on post-deployment detection and remediation, are no longer sufficient to manage emerging risks.
Its platform allows organisations to design secure cloud architectures before deployment, generate infrastructure as code automatically, and continuously validate live environments against approved architectural standards. A key feature of the system is its ability to reduce “security drift”, where live infrastructure gradually deviates from its intended design and compliance requirements over time.
By embedding regulatory and security controls directly into engineering workflows, Dawnguard aims to shift compliance decision-making closer to the design phase, allowing engineering and security teams to address risks earlier in the development lifecycle. The company initially worked with enterprise design partners to refine its platform before transitioning to general availability for wider commercial use.
Dawnguard co-founder and CEO Mahdi Abdulrazak said the cybersecurity industry’s reactive model is increasingly outdated.
“Cybersecurity has become trapped in an endless cycle of detection, response, and patching. 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.”
Dawnguard CTO and co-founder Kim van Lavieren added that the platform is built to close the gap between design intent and live systems.
“Every engineering team understands the gap between what was designed and what ultimately gets deployed. 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.”
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