Founders' Note: The Seezo Story

27 October 2025

Authors: Rakshitha R Rao & Sandesh Mysore Anand

We started Seezo two years ago to build AppSec products we wish we had as operators. In that time, we've had a chance to build a compelling product, serve thousands of users (including paying customers) from across the world, and build an incredible team that believes in the mission. Earlier today, we also announced our $7M Seed round fundraise led by Accel, with participation from Transpose, Trenches, Ahead VC, MyAsia VC, and a fantastic list of Angels that includes Security operators and startup founders. 

We are, however, just getting started in our journey to make world-class AppSec accessible to every engineering team. In this note, we outline the principles that guide us and provide details about our first product.

Seezo Principles

  1. Be a compass, not a GPS

AppSec teams across the board face similar problems, but the contexts in which they operate differ. This is dictated by company culture, geography-specific risks, tech stack, and much more. However, AppSec products often impose their workflow and methodologies on AppSec teams. This is reflected in the user experience, pricing plans, and the product roadmap.

We believe AppSec teams know what's best for their team. Whether a program should be fully automated or have lots of humans in the loop should be decided based on team culture and not dictated by the tooling you use.  Whether you want to roll out your new AppSec tool to a handful of developers or the entire org should depend on your annual plans, not on who checked in code to your GitHub repos. 

In other words, most security products try to be a GPS, giving turn-by-turn directions and assuming there’s one correct route. We think that approach doesn’t work. Seezo is a compass: we help teams set direction, but let them chart their own path. This principle is built into our product flows, pricing strategy, and branding (this is the reason you see so many compasses on our home page :) )

  1. AppSec products for AppSec teams

Somewhere during the SaaS boom, the industry went from building for Security teams to building for developers. While this appears well-intentioned, the real reason was to cash in on the SaaS trend of charging per-user, per-month. While this makes sense for code-related AppSec work, this makes no sense for the rest of AppSec, where Security teams do the heavy lifting and involve stakeholders such as Product, DevOps, Audit, and Senior management.

Seezo will build primarily for Security teams, while recognizing that we also need to help Security teams manage with their critical stakeholders (such as developers, auditors, etc.). 

  1. Follow the SDLC, but quickly

AppSec changes in subtle ways every time the SDLC evolves. We went from quarterly AppSec assessments to once-a-sprint when Agile took hold. The arrival of CI/CD pipelines led to every pull request being assessed and the emergence of Rapid Risk Assessments. With each iteration, the nature of Software Supply Chain risks evolved too. 

The SDLC is changing, again. While it's tempting to think the transformation is complete, it's not. LLM-powered tools have changed how we write (generate?) code, but the "build", "test", and "deploy" stages have largely remained the same. This will change, too. And when it does, AppSec will need to adapt. 

In our conversations with dozens of AppSec teams, we are already seeing them struggle to keep up with the barrage of new code being checked in to code repositories. This happens because AppSec budgets don't grow at the same pace as code generation. 

A core principle of all of risk management (including AppSec) are maker-checker systems. The person/product making the system should not be the one checking the system. Security issues arise because of biases from systems, assumptions made by humans/tools, etc. You can’t expect the tools that have these biases to also somehow check for these biases and remove them. As the SDLC evolves,  Seezo will dedicate resources to monitor the evolution and build the “checkers” needed to respond to the evolving SDLC.

  1. Automate manual workflows, not humans

We know autonomous agents are all the rage today, but a core superpower of LLMs is their ability to automate manual, complex workflows. While there is also a moral argument to be made against “replacing humans”, we are actually making a practical one. The best way to leverage LLMs is to automate manual workflows while keeping humans in the loop to make decisions where necessary. Seezo will build products that let our customers decide which workflows to automate and when a human-in-the-loop is necessary. Our job is to provide the tooling to help you make the right decisions for your company.

  1. Build world-class products for every AppSec team

The Security market is skewed towards supporting a small set of companies in a few critical industries. Nothing wrong with that, given they have the most Security risk as well. The downstream impact of this bias is that many wonderful products just don't work for companies from industries or geographies that don't fit that bill. We want to change that. We want to build products that can be used by the top banks in the world with massive AppSec teams and by up-and-coming startups where the CTO *is* the head of AppSec. 

This is not easy. Experts tell us this can spread us thin and lead to a lack of focus. But AI changes that. For the first time in decades, it is now possible to build customizations at scale without requiring an army of developers focused solely on them. This gives us the opportunity to build products with a strong core that can also be modified to meet every customer’s needs.

Seezo Security Design Review (SDR)

Our first product in this exciting journey helps teams automate Security Design Reviews. An activity that has remained manual and hard-to-scale for decades. 

Traditionally, design-stage security activities such as SDR required humans to process a lot of unstructured data (design documents, JIRA tickets, architectural diagrams), convert them into a structured data (DFDs, long questionnaires etc.), before bloated tools could analyze them and generate results. 

LLMs change all that. With Seezo SDR, every feature your developers build goes through an automated Security Design Review

Whether your current reviews happen informally on Slack, are triggered through Jira, or are done manually by reviewing documents, Seezo SDR enables you to automate each of these workflows.

A common frustration with LLM-powered products is how they can feel like a black box. Seezo SDR ensures the results are explainable, customizable to your company’s needs, and easy to understand for both AppSec engineers and developers.

We can tell you a lot more about it, but the best way to learn more about Seezo SDR is to try it out. You can do this for free at https://app.seezo.io. 

Join Us

We've had an exciting start and built a stellar founding team, but achieving the vision of making world-class AppSec accessible to every engineering team needs more believers.

If you read this far, you are probably really interested in what we are building. Come join us! You will have an opportunity to build out the vision and influence it (when presented with the right arguments, we often change our minds).

We currently have open roles in the US (Remote) and India (Bengaluru). If you don't see an open position that matches your interests but would still like to consider working with us, write to us at hiring@seezo.io. We read every email we get!