One Million Club: Aikido

Early December, the One Million Club gathered in Ghent. Roeland Delrue shared the story of his scaleup: Aikido. 

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Many companies dream of becoming a unicorn, but only a handful of scaleups manage to reach a valuation of at least 1 billion. Everything indicates that Belgium may soon welcome a new unicorn, as the Ghent-based Aikido is growing at record speed. That’s why the scaleup is the ideal host for a gathering of the One Million Club, the Scaleup Flanders initiative for growth companies with at least 1 million euros in revenue or funding. 

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Twice a year, our One Million Club comes together to hear the story of an inspiring Flemish entrepreneur. In the past, we visited Deliverect, Teamleader, and THEO Technologies, among others. In December, we were welcomed by Roeland Delrue (ex-Showpad), who launched Aikido in 2022 along with Willem Delbaere (ex-Teamleader) and Felix Garriau (ex-Nexxworks). 

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After just one year, Aikido raised 5 million euros, followed the next year by a 16-million-euro investment. The scaleup’s go-to-market was exceptionally fast, reaching thousands of users in no time. What is their magic formula? 

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From complexity to clarity

Aikido is a security tool for developers. “The speed at which developers write code has doubled with the rise of artificial intelligence, but at the same time, the risk of things going wrong has increased. This can lead to leaks, hacks, or viruses,” Roeland explained. “As a technical lead, you must pay attention to dozens of things, such as malware, license risks, runtime protection, dynamic testing, open-source dependencies...” 

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Things can quickly become complex, something the Aikido founders knew from previous jobs. “At Officient, which Willem founded, they had 20,000 companies as customers. They had to take extremely good care of that business data, since all employee information lived in their cloud. That’s when they saw that security tools for developers were complex, expensive, and scattered,” Roeland said.

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In terms of cybersecurity, a scaleup quickly ends up using dozens of products, each with its own focus. “They all cost a lot of money and are developed by large American and Israeli companies. At Officient, they paid hundreds of thousands of euros per year for complex tools designed by and for cybersecurity experts. That’s fine for companies like Coca-Cola, which have tens of millions in cybersecurity budgets, but for scaleups, it’s too complex. Those dozens of tools also trigger many false alarms, and after a while, everything is flashing red, but you start ignoring it. The risk is that you become immune to it, and that’s extremely dangerous. That’s why we founded Aikido.” 

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100 million ARR

Aikido customers therefore pay an accessible all-in-one price for a tool that gives developers real-time insight into potential vulnerabilities. “We focus heavily on a stellar UI and UX for our platform, and we eliminate false positives. We spent a lot of time building trust, because people not only connect their codebase systems, but also their cloud and container registries.” 

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Aikido now has a team of 160 people and an ARR of 16 million euros. “We grow 12 percent month over month and plan to reach 100 million ARR by 2027. We currently have 30,000 free users and 1,700 paying customers. More than half of them are in North America, a third in Europe. In Belgium, companies such as Visma, itsme, and doccle are customers. We perform especially well in HealTech, SecurTech, and LegalTech, sectors that face many compliance requirements.” 

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Aikido acquires customers in several ways, but 85 percent comes from inbound leads. “A large part of sales is product-led, because customers find us online and convert on their own. We designed Aikido so you don’t need a human to learn how it works, thanks to extensive documentation. Then there is sales-assisted growth, where prospects first receive a demo. A salesperson is involved, but more as a facilitator. Finally, there is sales-led growth; long sales cycles with many meetings, RFPs, and multiple demos.” 

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Aikido can scale especially well by making onboarding as easy as possible. “People need to see that it works, so why would you put the real impact all the way at the end and potentially waste people’s time? Our best marketers are the North Koreans: when our software prevented major hacks from them, our website had half a million visits in less than a week.” 

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20 founders

What truly makes Aikido strong, Roeland said, is the team's entrepreneurial spirit. “More than twenty people working with us were once founders of a startup. They launched Oco Reef, Sparkcentral, Trag, Allseek, Haicker… Louis Jonckheere, who once founded Showpad, is also joining us. We also maintain extremely close customer contact. I’m in 1,700 shared Slack channels and 300 Teams channels. The feedback loop is short, which allows us to iterate quickly and solve problems fast.”