Aikido Security, the Belgian cybersecurity company that became Europe’s fastest startup to reach unicorn status, launched Aikido Endpoint on April 20. The product is a lightweight security agent that sits on developer machines and inspects every package, IDE extension, browser plugin, and AI tool before installation, blocking anything flagged as risky. The announcement was covered by GlobeNewswire and SiliconANGLE.
The Attack Pattern That Forced the Product
The launch follows the worst stretch of supply chain compromises in open-source history. In March 2026, a threat group called TeamPCP chained stolen credentials across four major projects in under ten days: Trivy (container security), Checkmarx KICS (infrastructure-as-code scanning), LiteLLM (LLM proxy), and Telnyx (communications API). Days later, Axios, the most widely used HTTP client in JavaScript with over 100 million weekly downloads, was compromised separately through a hijacked maintainer account.
Every attack targeted the same thing: developer devices. These machines hold cloud credentials, npm publish tokens, SSH keys, Kubernetes configs, and direct source code access. In multiple recent incidents, a single compromised developer credential was used to publish malicious versions of legitimate packages, cascading across thousands of downstream organizations.
How Endpoint Differs From Existing Tools
Existing supply chain security tools focus on code repositories, CI/CD pipelines, or individual package managers. Endpoint operates at the device level, monitoring every install across the machine regardless of source. Coverage spans npm, PyPI, Maven, NuGet, VS Code extensions, browser extensions, and AI agent skills marketplaces.
One key default: Endpoint blocks any package published less than 48 hours ago, closing the window when new supply chain malware is most likely to go undetected. The product deploys through existing MDM controls and includes governance workflows with request-and-approval paths for blocked packages.
AI Agents as the New Attack Surface
Aikido frames AI coding agents as a multiplying factor for supply chain risk. These agents pull packages, utilize tools, and add dependencies autonomously, expanding the attack surface on developer machines without human review of each addition. “Writing a supply chain attack used to require real skill. Now you need an $8 ChatGPT subscription,” said Charlie Eriksen, Aikido’s Lead Security Researcher, in the press release.
Aikido Intel, the company’s threat intelligence engine, now identifies over 100,000 malicious packages per day across open-source registries, up from roughly 20,000 a day one year ago. That 5x increase tracks with the declining barrier to entry for writing supply chain malware.
The Enterprise Gap
CEO Willem Delbare described developer machines as “the Achilles’ heel of the software supply chain,” noting that most organizations “have zero visibility into what’s being installed on them, by human or agent.” The product builds on Safe Chain, Aikido’s open-source CLI firewall with over 200,000 weekly downloads, adding enterprise governance, audit trails, and centralized policy management.
Aikido’s customer list includes the Premier League, Revolut, SoundCloud, and Niantic. The company is positioning Endpoint as the missing layer between existing code-scanning tools and the unmonitored developer workstation where most initial compromises actually occur.