Nobody loves talking to salespeople. Roeland Delrue opened his PR_D_CT DAY 2025 talk with that blunt observation, then spent the next thirty minutes explaining how Aikido Security built a company where the product does the selling. Founded in October 2022 in Ghent, Aikido grew to 150 people, 1,500 customers, 30,000 workspaces, and 15 million euros in ARR in just over two years.
The funding trajectory tells its own story: a 2 million euro pre-seed, a 5 million euro seed round, and a 16 million euro Series A. Today, 53% of Aikido's revenue comes from North America and 37% from Europe. Those numbers were not built by a large sales army. They were built by product-led growth engineered by someone who thinks like a salesperson.
Roeland's core argument challenged the traditional funnel where marketing hands leads to sales, and sales hands closed deals to product. At Aikido, the boundaries between those functions dissolve. The product itself becomes the primary sales motion, and the people building it need to think about revenue from day one.
Original Presentation Slides
Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.
