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The Symbiotic Security Story
The widespread adoption of AI coding assistants has reshaped how software is built — and quietly opened one of the largest security gaps the industry has ever faced. By 2024, more than 75% of developers were using AI coding tools daily, and independent studies were already showing that over 80% of AI-generated code contained exploitable vulnerabilities. The traditional security stack, designed to scan code after the fact, was structurally unfit for a world in which code is written by autonomous agents at machine speed.
Symbiotic Security was built to close that gap — by embedding security directly into the code generation process itself.
A Deal Born From a Panel — and a Lunch in Paris
It started with a panel. On July 5, 2023, Brice Lapouble, partner at Axeleo Capital, shared a roundtable on the internationalization of cybersecurity companies with Edouard Viot, then VP Product at GitGuardian. They didn't know each other well at the time. The real conversation happened after, at the cocktail that followed the event.
“We hit it off at the cocktail and kept in touch regularly after that. Edouard is sharp, deeply technical, and has that rare combination of product instinct and security expertise. The kind of person you want to keep close in this industry.” noticed Brice Lapouble
Over the following months, the two maintained a steady back-and-forth. Cybersecurity moves fast, and having trusted people to compare notes with matters. During one of their exchanges, Edouard mentioned a close friend: Jérôme Robert, former CMO of Alsid.
That name rang a bell. Axeleo had backed Alsid a few years earlier, before the company was acquired by Tenable. Jérôme had since relocated to New York to help scale Alsid's operations there on behalf of Tenable. Small world.
“When Edouard told me he was close friends with Jérôme, I thought: OK, interesting. Jérôme is someone we knew well from the Alsid days. He had moved to NYC, built real go-to-market experience in the US, and had stayed deep in the cyber ecosystem.”
Then came the lunch. A few months after the panel, somewhere in central Paris, Edouard dropped the real news: he and Jérôme were not just friends. They were launching a company together — a cybersecurity startup focused on making AI-generated code secure by design.
For Brice, the decision was fast.
“Two seasoned cyber operators, complementary profiles, who know each other well and are going after a problem that's about to explode. Edouard brings the product and technical depth. Jérôme brings the GTM and enterprise experience, plus a US footprint from day one. For me, it was a no-brainer.”
Axeleo co-led the pre-seed alongside Lerer Hippeau, a New York-based fund with deep roots in the US tech ecosystem. Eighteen months later, the bet looked more than validated.
Scaling the Conviction
In January 2025, Symbiotic Security announced a $10M seed round led by Alven, with participation from Drysdale and existing backers Lerer Hippeau and Axeleo Capital. The round also attracted notable angels from the AI world: Thomas Wolf (co-founder, Hugging Face) and Julien Launay (CEO, Adaptive ML) among them.
By that point, the company had already deployed its platform with over 15 enterprise customers. Their flagship product, Symbiotic Code, had become the first AI code generation agent built to produce only secure code — model-agnostic, supporting everything from Claude to DeepSeek to Mistral, across cloud and on-premise setups.
The timing was sharp. Symbiotic positioned itself exactly where the industry needed a solution: not scanning code after the fact, but embedding security into the generation process itself.
Why This Deal Matters
The Symbiotic story captures something Axeleo looks for in every investment: founders with deep, first-hand knowledge of the problem they're solving, a complementary team that has been tested, and a market where timing and positioning align.
“This is what conviction-driven investing looks like. You meet someone at a panel, you stay in touch because the person is genuinely interesting, and one day they tell you they're starting something with the exact right co-founder. You don't need a 50-page market report to know this is worth backing.”
Symbiotic Security operates out of New York and Paris. The team is growing, the product is live, and the enterprise pipeline keeps expanding.