Rilian has closed a $17.5m seed and seed extension funding round to accelerate its expansion across the United States, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and other Allied nations.
The round was led by 8VC, First In, and Tamarack Global, with additional contributions from 8090 Industries, Liquid 2 Ventures, Perot Jain, and Protego Ventures. The capital will be directed towards go-to-market activities, the recruitment of engineering talent, and research and development in agentic AI-powered cyber and defence solutions for both commercial and nation-scale deployments.
Rilian was co-founded by Christian Schnedler, Nick Pompeo, and Dan Fischer — all with backgrounds in AI security and defence operations. The company has developed Caspian, its flagship agentic security orchestration platform, which brings together a curated suite of cyber and defence technology capabilities, autonomous delivery, and a unified command layer across an organisation’s existing tools and infrastructure.
The AI-native platform supports deployment across private or sovereign cloud, on-premise, air-gapped, and compliance-constrained environments. Its pre-trained AI agents are designed to enhance analyst productivity through automation, anticipate adversary behaviour, preserve institutional knowledge, and reduce onboarding complexity.
Global cybersecurity and risk management spending has recently crossed $200bn per year, according to Gartner, with further growth on the horizon. The public-sector cybersecurity market is projected to expand from approximately $45–50bn in 2025 to over $70bn by 2030, as the US, NATO allies, and partner governments invest in critical infrastructure protection, zero-trust architectures, and sovereign cloud adoption.
In July 2025, Rilian signed a contract with the UAE Cybersecurity Council to help secure the country’s critical infrastructure. Under the agreement, the UAE’s National Security Operations Center (NSOC) is deploying Caspian to integrate, operate, and automate cybersecurity solutions across operational technology environments, with dedicated AI agents trained to assess risks and respond to threats at the national level. Rilian has also established strategic partnerships with a range of cyber and defence technology providers, hyperscalers, and AI model developers, including SentinelOne, Censys, and SimSpace.
Rilian CEO and co-founder Christian Schnedler said, “For many national security organizations, the challenge of executing their mission is not a lack of budget or technology; it is the effective utilization of technical capabilities with limited skilled manpower. Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, Northern Virginia, and other innovation hubs regularly produce impactful capabilities. Unfortunately, these take years to scale within governments at home, let alone deploying to global conflict zones where defenders need them most. Rilian was built to turn security into an execution success, not a procurement and human staffing problem.”
Schnedler continued, “This funding accelerates our mission to ensure that the U.S. government, its Allies and critical infrastructure providers globally can access and operationalize the most advanced security capabilities through the power of agentic AI – with the speed, trust, and compliance their missions demand.”
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