Preparing for a $60M Series B: How Aikido used Jurimesh

Aikido Security went from zero to unicorn in three years. When it came time to close their $60M Series B at a billion-dollar valuation, their General Counsel Hans Kayaert didn't bring in a small army of advisors. He used Jurimesh to prepare the data room and run a mock due diligence before investors showed up.

About Aikido

Aikido Security is a Belgian cybersecurity platform that secures software applications end-to-end, from code to cloud to runtime. In roughly three years, the company has grown to over $21M in annual recurring revenue, serving thousands of paying customers ranging from startups to large enterprises.

Their legal function had to keep up with that pace. When Hans joined as General Counsel, legal wasn't exactly top of mind. "The spirit of the company was very much one of you either code during the day or you sell during the day," he recalls. That changed quickly. Today, the legal team handles commercial negotiations, compliance, product development support, and corporate development, including acquisitions. Still a skeleton crew for a company moving at this speed.

The challenge

A Series B is a different animal. Unlike earlier rounds where the pitch and momentum do the heavy lifting, Series B investors dig into company fundamentals. Financial systems, legal risk management, IP, employment, international regulatory exposure. Everything gets scrutinized. "You feel that investors are putting more emphasis on the financial side of things," Hans explains. "The maturity of an organization needs to keep up. That's sometimes quite a bit of a transition going from Series A to Series B."

With top-tier investors like DST Global and PSG on the other side, the request lists were extensive and detailed. Hans needed to make sure there were no delays, no gaps, and no surprises when the moment arrived. "The number one goal was to make sure that this process was going to stay within the amount of days that we had in mind for the timing of the closing to happen." When the momentum is there, you can't afford hiccups.

Running a mock due diligence with Jurimesh

Hans didn't wait for investor requests to start preparing. He already had a data request list from earlier experience with IPOs and startup fundraisings. He loaded that into Jurimesh and started throwing in documents: unstructured, high volume, everything that had accumulated over nearly two years of hypergrowth.

Jurimesh scanned the documents, flagged risks, and, just as important, highlighted where information was incomplete. "I was basically kind of doing a sort of mock due diligence by having the system play the role of the lawyer," Hans says. The platform immediately surfaced gaps: missing documents, sections that needed to be strengthened, and areas where the data room was falling short of what investors would expect.

Interesting things came up along the way. Drafting defects, completeness issues, the kind of clerical stuff that happens in the heat of the moment but can create ambiguity if left uncaught. "Having a skeleton team in a fast-growing company with high volume of legal requests, it's really nice to know that Jurimesh is helping me capture things that happen in the heat of the moment." By the time investors came knocking, the data room was ready. "The minute the lawyers were starting to look at it, we were able to hand that over without any further delay."

Beyond the Series B

The fundraise was just one use case. Hans uses Jurimesh as an ongoing substitute for traditional contract lifecycle management, capturing high-volume documents as they fly by, checking for deviations against internal risk playbooks, and staying on top of what matters across the business.

Now that Aikido is actively acquiring companies to expand their platform, including several acquisitions around their AI penetration testing product, Jurimesh plays a role there too. "From a buy-and-build perspective, this allows us to be very nimble," Hans explains. "Already do very first sanity checks, not needing to wait until an outside firm comes in. Having that information sooner in the process also helps me as a negotiator to arrive at a deal quicker."

For smaller acquisitions, the law firm isn't always needed. "We're pragmatic people here at Aikido. If we're doing a small acquisition, Jurimesh in and of itself is more than enough to progress." In fact, Hans puts it at 95%.

Same logic, different area of business

There's a reason this partnership feels natural. Aikido scans code, cloud configurations, and runtime environments for security vulnerabilities, then triages and prioritizes them so engineers can act on what matters. Jurimesh does the same with contracts and legal documents. It scans, flags risks, groups them by severity, and presents them so the lawyer has a prioritized view.

"The parallels of what Aikido is doing and Jurimesh is doing are pretty stark," Hans says. "In many ways, what Aikido is doing and Jurimesh is doing is pretty much the same thing, just in a different area of business."