From hacking curiosity at age ten to leading security for large enterprises, Kim van Lavieren has spent his life at the intersection of software, security, and leadership. Today, as Co-Founder and CTO of Dawnguard, he’s on a mission to fix what he sees as a fundamentally broken approach to enterprise security: slow, painful processes that hold businesses back instead of enabling them.

Drawing on experience as a security engineer, architect, CISO, and even an officer in the military, Kim has developed a deep understanding of both the offensive and defensive sides of cybersecurity. That journey eventually led him into PhD research and, ultimately, to the idea behind Dawnguard. Dawnguard is an AI-powered platform that helps organizations accelerate their go-to-market securely by optimizing existing cloud environments and designing secure architectures from the ground up.

In this Bright Founders Talk episode by Temy, Kim shares how his eclectic background—from national team sports to leading under pressure in the military—shaped his view on leadership and resilience. He also explains why cybersecurity is one of the most complex and exciting fields in tech, bringing together engineering, networking, and the human factor. In this article, we dive into the key insights from our conversation with Kim about building secure products at startup speed, and what it really takes to turn security into a business enabler rather than a blocker.

From Teenage Hacker to AI-Powered Defender: Kim’s Road to Dawnguard

Kim’s story in tech basically starts before most kids even get their first email address. He was already building software at around ten, and by high school he’d launched his first company, creating secure web content management systems while his classmates were worrying about exams. From there, the path just kept leveling up—security engineer, security architect, CISO, leading big engineering and security teams, and eventually working in enterprise security at a huge corporate. That’s where the frustration really kicked in: security reviews were slow, the business was always annoyed, and the whole system felt broken. Instead of accepting that as “just how it is,” Kim dove into PhD research to figure out how to make security fast, seamless, and actually helpful for the business.

What really shaped the way Kim leads today didn’t just come from boardrooms or code reviews—it started on the baseball field and was hardened in the military. As a kid, he played sports at a high level, even making it to the national team, where teamwork and accountability weren’t just buzzwords, they determined whether you won or lost. Later, as an officer in the military, he had to lead under intense pressure, with very little sleep and zero room for excuses. That’s where he learned that real leadership is about bringing people together, getting them to rally around a shared goal, and helping them do their best work, whether you’re their manager or just a teammate standing next to them.

Cybersecurity became the perfect playground for Kim’s mix of curiosity, discipline, and love for complexity. Encouraged early on by his dad to focus on building software securely—because almost no one else was—Kim first dove into hacking and penetration testing, fascinated by all the ways systems could be broken. Over time, he realized, as he puts it, “You really should know both sides of the coin, offensive and defensive, to get the full picture.” That mindset eventually led to Dawnguard, the AI-powered platform he co-founded to help companies speed up their go-to-market securely. With a small founding team of four and a vision to optimize existing cloud environments and design new secure solutions from scratch, Dawnguard is Kim’s answer to a world where security can’t afford to be slow anymore.

Raising $3M, Building a Dream Team, and Moving at Startup Speed

Fresh off raising $3M from Benevolent Capital, Kim didn’t jump straight into hiring strangers from LinkedIn—he opened his mental Rolodex. He went back through every company he’d ever worked at and asked himself a simple question: Who would I genuinely want to work with again? Then he started calling those people. Many of them said yes. That’s how Dawnguard ended up with a crew of senior engineers Kim already trusted, people he knew could deliver and fit the culture. In just a few months, the team grew to 24, not through reckless scaling, but by handpicking talent that could both move fast and build things right.

Networking wasn’t just useful at the beginning—it’s still their secret weapon. Kim’s co-founder, Mahdi, comes with what Kim jokingly calls “cyber celebrity” status. In the Netherlands and across the EU, everyone seems to know him, which makes it a lot easier to reach top engineers, land intros, and open doors with potential customers and partners. Kim’s advice to future founders is pretty straightforward: invest in your network long before you think you’ll need it. Those coffees, conferences, and late-night Slack DMs turn into co-founders, early hires, beta users, and investors when it’s time to build something real.

Under the hood, Dawnguard is basically an AI-powered version of a world-class security team. Kim and his team modeled how security engineers and architects actually work—how they review architecture diagrams, dig through policies, map systems to regulations, and try to spot weak points across huge, messy enterprise environments. They broke that job down into smaller “engines” and let AI do the heavy lifting: reading hundreds of documents, pulling out what matters, and layering reasoning on top to mimic how a human expert would think. The biggest challenge now isn’t the tech—it’s scaling the company without losing its edge. Kim knows competitors will come; that’s inevitable. The real race is about talent and speed, and as he puts it, “You have to be a pioneer if you want to change cybersecurity.”

Stop Forcing Security on People: Kim’s Smarter Way to “Shift Left”

For Kim, being a pioneer isn’t about buzzwords, it’s about making security something teams actually use. When a new customer reaches out, the technical setup is surprisingly painless: Dawnguard connects to their cloud environment in minutes, and within the first hour they already see a visual map of their architecture and early security insights. The real magic, though, is in how it fits into existing workflows. Some companies plug it straight into their dev teams so engineers can design new solutions securely; others hand it to security teams to review architectures; many do both. The goal is simple: make a big security impact without asking people to completely reinvent how they work.

That’s also where Kim sees most “shift left” efforts falling apart. A lot of security folks still hope everyone in the company will suddenly start caring deeply about security, on top of already hectic roadmaps and tight deadlines. Reality check: that’s not happening. Kim has seen it firsthand—teams promise to do threat modeling before building, then a stakeholder comes in saying, “We need this feature tomorrow,” and guess what gets dropped first. As he puts it, “If we try to change human behavior to enable shift left, we’re taking the hardest route possible.” Instead of preaching, Dawnguard quietly does the heavy lifting in the background, letting developers focus on what the system should do while the platform handles the messy security analysis.

AI is the other big character in this story, and Kim is both excited and a little worried. On one hand, AI is transforming security operations: smarter tooling in monitoring and response, automated penetration testing, and “agentic” systems that tell you which two vulnerabilities actually matter out of a thousand, cutting through alert fatigue that has haunted CISOs for years. On the other hand, AI-generated code is flooding codebases at a speed that outpaces security improvements—especially when tools don’t understand a company’s architecture or ecosystem. They might secure a single function, but miss how that service talks to ten others. Kim believes the real future lies in combining both worlds: AI-enhanced coding backed by deep architectural context. That’s the gap Dawnguard is racing to fill—making sure AI doesn’t just help you ship faster, but ship safer too.

When Attackers Run Faster Than Defenders

For Kim, the uncomfortable truth in cybersecurity is pretty simple: the bad guys are winning on speed. While nation-state actors and criminal groups pour all their time and resources into inventing new attacks, defenders are stuck playing catch-up with limited budgets, rules, and red tape. “Attackers are always a step ahead,” he says, and it’s not because security teams are lazy or incompetent—it’s because attackers don’t have to follow laws, policies, or ethics. They can experiment, move fast, and break anything. Security companies don’t exactly love saying that out loud in their marketing, but Kim believes you can’t fix a problem you refuse to admit exists.

Instead of seeing regulation as the enemy of innovation, Kim takes a very different stance—especially in the context of the EU and the AI Act. For him, these rules aren’t shackles, they’re guardrails. They don’t magically cover every future risk, but they do force companies to ask the right ethical questions early: what kind of AI use is okay, and what crosses the line? When he started Dawnguard, he deliberately aligned with standards like ISO AI management guidelines to build something safe and human-centered from day one, not as an afterthought. Sure, Europe might move a bit slower than the US or China in some innovation races, but Kim thinks that trade-off buys something valuable: trust. If you care where your data lives and who touches it, a European company that takes regulation seriously suddenly looks very attractive.

Looking ahead, Kim’s vision for Dawnguard sounds almost sci-fi, but very practical at the same time. The team is still in prototyping mode, working with early customers, and aiming for general availability next year. The end goal? A platform where you just describe what you want in plain language—what your system should do—and Dawnguard designs it, bakes in all the right laws, regulations, and internal policies, generates the code, deploys it, and keeps it compliant over time. That’s not just a productivity boost, that’s a totally new way of thinking about secure development. And to anyone dreaming of launching their own company, Kim leaves them with one more grounded piece of wisdom: don’t do it alone. Find a co-founder you genuinely like and trust, someone who shares your values and vision—because the work will be hard, but with the right person, the journey can still feel like a fun ride, not just a grind.