Aikido: Powering Developer-First Security Integrations at Scale

The company

Aikido Security is a Ghent-based cybersecurity startup founded in 2022 by serial entrepreneur Willem Delbare (CEO & CTO), Roeland Delrue (COO & CRO), and Felix Garriau (CMO). The company has raised $24.5M in funding, including a $17M Series A in May 2024, and was named Belgium's Venture Company of the Year 2024.

Aikido delivers a developer-first security platform that consolidates code and cloud security scanning into a single interface. Their straightforward approach to application security has resonated with thousands of SaaS companies frustrated by legacy tools that generate excessive noise and false positives. The platform is SOC 2 Type II certified and supports compliance standards including ISO 27001, HIPAA, and the European NIS 2 Directive.

Willem Delbare founded three SaaS companies before Aikido, including Teamleader and Officient. He built Aikido from the perspective of an unsatisfied customer who had spent countless hours on irrelevant security alerts as a CTO.

The Challenge

The Challenge: Meeting Developers Where They Work As Aikido's customer base grew rapidly, a core integration challenge emerged. Development teams need security findings to flow into their existing workflows. Whether a team uses Jira, GitHub Issues, GitLab, Linear, or Asana, they expect vulnerabilities to appear as actionable tickets in their preferred system.

Building and maintaining individual integrations for each issue tracking platform would consume significant engineering resources. Each platform has its own API structure, authentication methods, rate limits, and data models. With customers using diverse toolchains, from enterprise Jira Data Center deployments to modern tools like Linear and ClickUp, the complexity adds up quickly.

The engineering team faced a choice: divert resources from core security innovation to build vendor-specific connectors, or find a scalable solution that could support the full range of issue tracking platforms their customers use.development team.

The Solution

Aikido adopted Apideck's Unified Issue Tracking API to address their integration needs. By implementing a single API, Aikido gained the ability to push security findings to multiple issue tracking platforms, including GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Jira Data Center, Linear, Asana, Azure DevOps, ClickUp, and monday.com, through one integration.

The implementation supports a key workflow: when a vulnerability is detected, it creates a ticket in the customer's preferred system. When the vulnerability is fixed in Aikido, the ticket syncs back. This keeps security embedded in the development workflow rather than siloed in a separate tool.

Apideck's Vault component provided a white-label authentication experience, allowing customers to connect their issue tracking accounts without leaving the Aikido platform.

Showcasing Integrations with Apideck Ecosystem

With over 100 integrations across version control, CI/CD, issue tracking, cloud platforms, and compliance tools, Aikido needed a way to showcase this breadth to prospects and customers. Building and maintaining a custom integrations directory would pull engineering resources away from security features.

Aikido uses Apideck Ecosystem to power their public integrations marketplace at integrations.aikido.dev. The solution provides:

A searchable integrations directory that lets prospects verify Aikido supports their stack before starting a trial. Categories span Git repositories, container registries, issue trackers, cloud providers, CI/CD tools, and compliance platforms.

Integration voting that captures customer demand for new connectors. When users request an integration Aikido doesn't yet support, they can vote and explain their use case, giving the product team clear prioritization signals.

Partner visibility for technology partners who integrate with Aikido. Partners like Vanta and Drata gain exposure through the marketplace, supporting Aikido's growing partner ecosystem of 29 technology and channel partners.

Zero maintenance overhead since Apideck handles the catalog infrastructure, search functionality, and UI. Aikido's team updates integration status without rebuilding pages.

The marketplace supports Aikido's sales motion by answering the "do you integrate with X?" question before it becomes a blocker in the evaluation process.

The Results: Scaling Integrations Without Scaling Complexity

The partnership delivered results across several dimensions:

Faster Time-to-Market: Instead of spending months building individual connectors, Aikido deployed issue tracking integration capabilities in weeks. This kept the engineering team focused on core security features like auto-fix and reachability analysis.

Broader Platform Coverage: Aikido supports the issue tracking tools their enterprise and SMB customers actually use, from Jira and GitHub to Linear and Notion. This breadth removes integration requirements as a sales blocker.

Lower Maintenance Burden With Apideck handling connector maintenance and upstream API changes, Aikido's engineering team avoids reactive work when platforms modify their APIs.

Better User Experience: Aikido customers have praised how the platform integrates with their existing tools. One customer noted: "My team loves the integration with Jira and how it feels like a tool tailored to their needs as engineers, not security experts."

Looking Ahead

Aikido continues to grow rapidly, now serving thousands of companies. The ability to scale integrations without proportional engineering investment has become a strategic advantage. The partnership positions Aikido to expand their integration ecosystem as new platforms emerge, while keeping engineering focus on their core mission: making security simple for developers.