Welcome to Season 5 of the Cyber Security District Podcast. In this episode, we sit down with with Kim van Lavieren, CTO and co-founder of Dawnguard, one of Europe’s most promising new cybersecurity startups. Kim brings a rare combination of engineering depth, product intuition, and hands-on experience building systems inside high-growth environments.
Since recording this episode, Dawnguard has grown rapidly from 9 to more than 21 employees, underscoring the demand for a smarter, automated approach to security-by-design.
Meet Kim van Lavieren
Before launching Dawnguard, Kim spent years building software engineering teams, designing secure architectures, and helping organisations modernise their development processes. His early work spanned everything from backend engineering to cloud-native design and threat modelling, giving him a clear view of how security typically lags behind development and how costly that gap can be.
Kim explains that the early conversations that led to Dawnguard were not about adding “yet another cybersecurity tool,” but about solving a deeper systemic problem: security comes in far too late.
“You can’t bolt security onto the side of a system and expect it to hold. It must be embedded from the start, baked into the architecture, not sprinkled on top.”
This principle became the core foundation of Dawnguard’s platform.
Why Security-by-Design Is Broken Today
Much of the conversation revolves around a reality everyone in cybersecurity knows too well: security is usually reactive. Teams rush to patch vulnerabilities, write compensating controls, or fix misconfigurations after deployment. By then, the cost both financial and operational is exponentially higher. Kim summarizes the problem clearly:
“Developers want to move fast, security wants assurance, and leadership wants both. That tension creates most of the risk.”
He shares how, in many companies, documentation is scattered, architectural decisions aren’t recorded properly, and no one has a unified overview of how systems evolve over time. Security reviews often come too late, when redesigning a component is no longer realistic. Dawnguard was designed to change that equation.
Building Dawnguard: A Platform for Day-Zero Security
Kim describes Dawnguard as a platform that enables teams to design, validate, and document secure systems from day zero, long before code is written. Instead of relying on manual diagrams or inconsistent documentation, Dawnguard centralizes architectural decisions, aligns them with threat models, and applies AI to validate design choices.
This allows engineering and security teams to collaborate much earlier, while dramatically reducing risk in later stages of development.
“If you get the architecture right, everything else becomes easier. If you get it wrong, everything becomes expensive.”
The platform aims not to slow development, but to remove friction, giving engineers clarity and giving security teams visibility, without forcing teams into heavyweight processes.
The Role of AI in Modern Architecture and Security
A recurring theme in Kim’s thinking is the role of AI as an architectural assistant. Instead of writing one-off documents or manually updating complex diagrams, Dawnguard automates the creation and validation of architecture layers, ensuring consistency across the entire environment.
Kim emphasizes that AI is not replacing architects or security engineers, it’s amplifying them:
“AI won’t replace security experts, but security experts using AI will outperform those who don’t.”
By helping teams reason about decisions, compare trade-offs, and assess potential risks, AI becomes a partner in the design process.
Going From Idea to Fast-Growing Startup
Kim also shares the early days of Dawnguard: ideating with co-founder Mahdi Abdulrazak, building initial prototypes, and onboarding early customers who saw immediate value. The company’s rapid growth, from 9 people at the time of recording to 21 today, reflects this traction.
He highlights how crucial it is for early-stage cybersecurity startups to stay focused:
“You can’t solve every problem at once. You must be laser-focused on the pain that truly matters.”
Dawnguard is doing exactly that, solving the pain of scattered documentation, inconsistent design processes, and reactive security practices.
The Future of Secure Architecture
Kim believes the biggest shift in the next decade will be the normalisation of intelligent architecture tooling. Engineering teams will rely on smart systems to ensure their designs remain consistent, compliant, and secure as environments evolve.
He predicts architecture becoming a continuous process, rather than a static document created once per project:
“Architecture will be living, dynamic, and always up-to-date. AI makes that possible for the first time.”
With Dawnguard, Kim and his team are pushing this future forward, helping organisations create secure foundations from day zero and maintain them throughout the entire lifecycle.
Learn more about Dawnguard here.
Watch the full episode on YouTube:
