Willem Delbare is the co-founder and chief executive of Aikido Security, a company in Ghent, Belgium, that makes security scanning software for developers, and he also serves as its chief technology officer. Before Aikido he was a technical co-founder and CTO at three software startups in Belgium, including the CRM maker Teamleader and the HR software company Officient, and all three were sold. He is known for arguing that security tools should be built for the developers who have to fix what they find.
Three Startups in Ghent
He spent about a decade building business software before he turned to security. He told Unite.AI in 2026 that he worked With three startups as a technical co-founder and CTO and three exits across HR tech, invoice tech, and carbon accounting.
Across all three, he said, the aim was building software that didn't make people want to throw their laptops out the window.
The first was Teamleader, which sells CRM, quoting, invoicing and project software to small companies. It was founded in July 2012 and by 2022 had more than 13,000 customers, when the software group Visma bought it, according to Visma. Officient, an HR software startup in Ghent co-founded by former Teamleader employees, signed up more than 4,000 customers in three years before the Dutch company Exact acquired it, as Flanders Investment and Trade reported. The third was FutureproofedCities, which helps cities account for their carbon emissions.
The Security Problem He Kept as CTO
As the technical founder he was the one responsible for security at each company, and he found the tools hard to live with. But at every one of those companies, security kept me up at night.
The products on offer, he said, looked like the inside of an F-16 cockpit. Expensive, overwhelming, and built for someone with a PhD in computer science, not a dev team trying to ship fast.
On Bret Fisher's DevOps and Docker Talk podcast he said that, as the technical co-founder, he expected a data breach would be blamed on him.
He founded Aikido in 2022 with Roeland Delrue, Felix Garriau and Madeline Lawrence, according to the company's About page, and built it as one product covering code, open-source dependencies, cloud accounts and running apps. The company's funding announcement quoted a line he repeats to staff: Developers just want to get back to building fun features.
A Security Unicorn From Belgium
Aikido sold first to developers, who could sign up for free and connect a repository without a sales call. He sees being outside the usual security centers as part of why that worked. The obvious one is being a cybersecurity company from Belgium.
The industry had grown up in Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley, he said, and there was early doubt that a leading security platform could come from anywhere else. The company grew instead through self-service sign-ups among small and mid-size businesses.
In January 2026 Aikido raised a $60 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation, led by DST Global. The announcement said revenue had grown five times in a year and listed the odds the team had faced: European team. Based in a village. No cyber pedigree.
The company now reports more than 350 employees.
AI and the Attack on Developer Machines
He argues that attackers have gained more from AI than defenders so far. Writing malicious open-source packages once took real skill, he told Unite.AI. Now it only requires an LLM subscription.
He also pointed to self-replicating worms that move across package registries and steal credentials as they go. But the honest reality is that the attackers are currently benefiting more from AI than the defenders are.
His answer is what Aikido calls self-securing software, where every code change is tested for real attack paths and fixes are written and retested automatically. He does not think combining tools is enough on its own: A unified platform that's mediocre at everything is just consolidating the problem.
Sources
- Unite.AI: Willem Delbare, co-founder and CEO of Aikido, interview series (2026)
- Aikido Security: Aikido raises $60M Series B at a $1B valuation (2026)
- Aikido Security: About
- Visma: Visma acquires Teamleader (2022)
- Flanders Investment and Trade: Exact acquires HR software firm Officient
- DevOps and Docker Talk with Bret Fisher: Aikido, is a single DevSecOps tool possible?
Sources retrieved October 22, 2026.
