Rilian, a provider of AI-native cybersecurity and defence systems integration capabilities, announced that it has raised $17.5 million in seed and seed extension funding. The round was led by 8VC, First In, and Tamarack Global, with participation from 8090 Industries, Liquid 2 Ventures, Perot Jain, and Protego Ventures. The round will fuel Rilian’s expansion across the United States, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, and other Allied nations, including go-to-market efforts, engineering talent acquisition, and research and development in agentic AI-powered cyber and defence technology solutions for commercial markets and nation‑scale environments.

Operation Epic Fury and the war in Ukraine illustrate how AI-enabled systems act as decisive force multipliers in hybrid conflicts, blending kinetic strikes with cyber operations targeting governments, the private sector and critical infrastructure alongside electronic warfare, information operations, and proxy forces, creating dense data environments that exceed human processing capacity alone. Adversaries empowered by AI act at machine speed while corporate and government security teams are often constrained by human inefficiency and technological latency in detection and response. But now, defenders can leverage AI as a force multiplier by expanding the effective capacity for analytic detection, countermeasures, and targeting through automation. They can enable faster, more precise cross-domain responses than adversaries can match, allowing defenders to generate disproportionate effects in cyberspace, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the physical domain.

Founded by leading AI security and defence operators, Christian Schnedler, Nick Pompeo, and Dan Fischer, Rilian developed its marquee agentic security orchestration platform, Caspian, to provide a curated arsenal of best-in-class cyber and defence technology capabilities, autonomous delivery, and a single command layer across organisations’ stacks and toolsets. The AI-native platform allows governments, the private sector, and critical infrastructure operators to rapidly access, securely deploy, and intelligently automate new security capabilities across private or sovereign cloud, on‑premise, air‑gapped, and compliance-constrained environments. Its pre-trained AI agents are capable of amplifying every analyst’s productivity through automation, learning from and anticipating adversaries’ attacks, capturing institutional knowledge, and flattening the learning curves related to new capabilities and new staff onboarding.

“For many national security organisations, the challenge of executing their mission is not a lack of budget or technology; it is the effective utilisation of technical capabilities with limited skilled manpower,” said Christian Schnedler, CEO and Co-Founder of Rilian. “Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, Northern Virginia, and other innovation hubs regularly produce impactful capabilities. Unfortunately, these take years to scale within governments at home, let alone deploying to global conflict zones where defenders need them most. Rilian was built to turn security into an execution success, not a procurement and human staffing problem.”