Rilian raises $17.5M to automate security software procurement and deployment in the defense sector

Rilian, a startup that builds agent systems integration tools for companies in the defense and national security industries, said today it has raised $17.5 million in seed funding.

The round was led by 8VC, Tamarack Global and First In, and saw participation from defense technology experts such as 8090 Industries, Liquid 2 Venture and Protego Ventures.

Rilian says he is building a kind of bridge between the latest innovations in artificial intelligence and the tightly controlled world of national defense and military systems. It does this by providing the military and defense contractors with the tools needed to deploy and manage complex security stacks more quickly.

The startup aims to address the problem of “technology latency” in a world where threats are moving at a rapid pace. When it comes to military conflicts, America and its allies must face all kinds of new and innovative methods of electronic warfare and cyberattacks, leading to a flood of “noise” that destroys human experts.

The problem isn’t a lack of effective cybersecurity tools, but rather the “release gap,” or time frames that take years for defenders to buy, test and deploy in a private cloud and airspace environment. At the same time, security teams often lack the staff needed to implement this increasingly confusing array of disconnected security tools.

Rilian’s solution and its flagship product is Caspian, which serves as an AI-native security orchestration platform. It is essentially a command layer that sits on top of the rest of the security stack. Rather than humans trying to monitor dozens of dashboards at once, we use AI agents that can work without humans to perform threat detection, countermeasures and targeting.

Startups are laser-focused on independent and aerospace applications. Caspian features an independent delivery engine that can move to updates in areas with compliance constraints in days rather than weeks. At the same time, it also tries to capture the “institutional knowledge” of human cyber security experts to reduce the learning curve for new employees.

Rilian targets friendly countries allied with the US and has signed a major contract with the Cybersecurity Council of the United Arab Emirates to help protect that country’s most important infrastructure. The Council uses Caspian to integrate and automate security processes across a range of operational technology areas, with AI agents responding to national security threats.

The company says it’s looking at a big opportunity, with global government spending predicted to top $70 billion a year by the end of the decade. It says there is a huge need for the “connective tissue” needed to implement a zero-trust architecture in critical IT environments.

Founder and CEO Christian Schnedler said his company wants to eliminate the procurement and labor issues that hinder the development of defense technology. “By treating safety as an engineering problem rather than a personnel problem, Rilian hopes to be the infrastructure for the next generation of machine systems, ensuring that defenders can eventually move as fast as the machines they fight against,” he said.

Photo: Rilian