Rilian secures $17.5M for agentic AI in defence

A McLean, Virginia startup building agentic AI systems for the defence and national security sector has secured $17.5 million in seed and seed extension funding. Rilian’s flagship product, the Caspian platform, acts as a command layer above existing security stacks, deploying pre-trained AI agents into air-gapped and compliance-restricted environments where commercial tools often fail.

The funding round was led by 8VC, First In, and Tamarack Global, with additional backing from 8090 Industries, Liquid 2 Ventures, Perot Jain, and Protego Ventures. The capital will fuel go-to-market expansion across the United States and Gulf Cooperation Council countries, along with engineering hires and R&D in AI-powered cyber and defence solutions tailored for governments and critical infrastructure operators.

Rather than forcing human analysts to juggle dozens of disconnected tools, Caspian automates threat detection, countermeasures, and targeting. The platform is built specifically for the most challenging environments: sovereign cloud deployments, on-premise infrastructure, air-gapped networks, and compliance-constrained government systems. Rilian claims the platform can deploy capability updates in days rather than weeks and captures institutional knowledge from human security experts to speed onboarding.

The problem Rilian tackles is structural. Defence ministries and national security agencies already have access to advanced cybersecurity technology from Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, and Northern Virginia. The real bottleneck is deployment: translating those capabilities into operational use at national scale, in environments deliberately isolated from the internet, bound by strict procurement rules, and staffed by limited cleared personnel.

CEO and co-founder Christian Schnedler framed it as a procurement and manpower problem disguised as a technology one. “Rilian was built to turn security into an execution success, not a procurement and human staffing problem,” he said.

The investor syndicate reflects the company’s geopolitical ambitions. 8VC, co-founded by Joe Lonsdale, counts Palantir and Anduril in its portfolio. First In is also an Anduril investor. Tamarack Global focuses on defence and national security. Protego Ventures, an Israeli defence-tech fund founded in 2024 by Lital Leshem and Lee Moser, has raised $70 million for defence startups; Leshem previously co-founded Carbyne, the emergency response software company sold to Axon for $625 million earlier this year.

The mix of US and Israeli defence-tech investors alongside Gulf-focused capital signals Rilian’s explicit targeting of the US-Israel-GCC defence technology triangle, a corridor that has grown in prominence since the Abraham Accords.

Schnedler serves as CEO. Dan Fischer is a co-founder. The third co-founder is Nick Pompeo, son of Mike Pompeo, the former CIA Director and US Secretary of State under Donald Trump. Nick Pompeo’s connections to US national security and defence procurement circles are material context for a company whose core proposition is accelerating government adoption of defence technology.

Rilian already has one major publicly disclosed customer. In July 2025, it signed a contract with the UAE Cybersecurity Council to deploy Caspian across the UAE’s National Security Operations Centre (NSOC) for critical infrastructure protection, including operational technology (OT) environments. The deal is described as the platform’s first nation-scale implementation. Partnerships with SentinelOne, Censys, and SimSpace further feed into the Caspian ecosystem.

The company frames its addressable market around global cybersecurity and risk management spending, which exceeds $200 billion annually per Gartner, with the government and public sector segment projected to grow from $45-50 billion in 2025 to over $70 billion by 2030. This is the company’s own market narrative, not independent validation, but it underscores the scale of the opportunity Rilian is chasing.