A startup called Rilian that’s building agentic systems integration tools for companies operating 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 specialists such as 8090 Industries, Liquid 2 Venture and Protego Ventures.

Rilian says it’s building a kind of bridge between the latest artificial intelligence innovations and the tightly regulated world of national defense and military systems. It’s doing this by providing militaries and defense contractors with the tools needed to deploy and manage complex security stacks as quickly as possible.

The startup aims to tackle the problem of “technological latency” in a world where threats move at rapid speed. When it comes to military conflicts, America and its allies have to deal with all kinds of new and innovative methods of electronic warfare and cyberattacks, resulting in a deluge of “noise” that overwhelms human experts.

The problem isn’t necessarily the lack of effective cybersecurity tools, but rather the “execution gap,” or the years-long time frames it takes for defenders to procure, vet and deploy them in sovereign cloud and air-gapped information technology environments. At the same time, security teams often lack the manpower needed to operate this increasingly dizzying array of disconnected security tools

Rilian’s solution and its core product is Caspian, which serves as an AI-native security orchestration platform. It’s essentially a command layer that sits above the entire security stack. Rather than have humans try to monitor dozens of dashboards at once, it implements AI agents that can work independently of humans to automate threat detection, countermeasures and targeting.

The startup is laser-focused on sovereign and air-gapped deployments. Caspian features an autonomous delivery engine that can push through updates in compliance-constrained environments in a matter of days rather than weeks. At the same time, it also attempts to capture the “institutional knowledge” of human cybersecurity experts in order to reduce the learning curve for new staffers.

Rilian is targeting friendly nations allied with the U.S. and has already signed a major contract with the United Arab Emirates’ Cybersecurity Council to help secure that country’s most critical infrastructure. The Council is using Caspian to integrate and automate security processes across a range of operational technology environments, with AI agents responding to threats to its national security.

The company says it’s targeting a massive opportunity, with global government spending forecast to top $70 billion annually by the end of the decade. It says there’s a desperate need for the “connective tissue” required to enable zero-trust architectures in critical IT environments.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Christian Schnedler said his company wants to eliminate the procurement and human staffing problems that currently bog down defense technology innovation. “By treating security as an engineering problem rather than a staffing one, Rilian hopes to become the foundational infrastructure for the next generation of mission systems, ensuring that defenders can finally move as fast as the machines they are fighting,” he said.

Image: Rilian