Rilian, a McLean, Virginia startup, has raised $17.5 million in seed funding led by 8VC to deploy its Caspian agentic AI platform into air-gapped defence and sovereign cloud environments. Caspian acts as a command layer over existing security stacks, using pre-trained AI agents to automate threat detection and countermeasures in compliance-restricted government systems. The company's first major contract is with the UAE Cybersecurity Council to deploy across the UAE's National Security Operations Centre. Co-founder Nick Pompeo, son of former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, brings relevant national security connections. Investors include defence-focused funds with ties to Palantir, Anduril, and Israeli defence-tech, signalling ambitions across the US-Israel-GCC defence technology triangle.
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