London, 11 September 2026 — LeoTrace, a London-based cybersecurity startup, today announced it has raised €1.7 million (£1.45 million) in pre-seed funding to ensure AI coding agents produce secure code from the first line. The round was led by Twin Path Ventures, with participation from Outward VC, GEC Capital, Golden Egg Check, and a group of angel investors.
Every security tool in use today was built for a world where humans wrote the code. Find the flaw, file the ticket, fix it next sprint. That model was already straining. Agents broke it: they write more code, far faster, and they copy whatever weaknesses already exist in the repo. Across 10,000 sessions where an agent touched code, 26% needed a security fix—and that share doesn’t fall as the models improve. It scales with how much code they write.
LeoTrace’s answer isn’t to detect faster. It’s to make the agent produce secure code in the first place.
LeoPrevent plugs directly into the coding agent. The moment the agent tries to hand work back, LeoPrevent intercepts the output, removes vulnerabilities, and sends it back to fix—within two seconds. Nothing else in the workflow changes. Teams move at the speed of AI without taking on the risk. It works with any agent and any model. Internal testing shows LeoPrevent removes roughly half the vulnerabilities that would otherwise ship to production, and the company is already in production with tier-1 financial institutions in the UK and US.
“Every security tool in use today was built for a world where humans wrote the code,” said Patrick Rycroft, co-founder and CEO of LeoTrace. “Agents broke that model. Our answer isn’t to detect faster. It’s to make the agent produce secure code in the first place.”
“Twin Path Ventures is proud to invest in LeoTrace. Our experience backing over 40 AI-first startups in the UK shows that security concerns are the major barrier to enterprise AI adoption, especially for agents. LeoTrace is the team and solution to address these very legitimate concerns,” said John Spindler, Partner at Twin Path Ventures.
“Regulated industries stand to be transformed by AI coding agents but adoption won’t happen until compliance can be proven. LeoTrace is building the platform to earn that trust with independent validation built into the workflow from the start. We invested because we believe the team is uniquely qualified to do this,” said Kevin Chong, Partner at Outward VC.
LeoTrace is founded by three veterans who have spent their careers building and breaking critical systems. Florian Walter and Boy Baukema built and secured some of the most critical systems on the planet, then spent their careers breaking them: Walter as an ethical hacker who knows which flaws actually get exploited, and Baukema with 19 years securing applications, nine of them at Veracode building the research and controls the industry’s scanners still run on today. Patrick Rycroft sold that generation of tooling into global enterprises and watched it fail the same way every time: the tool finds the problem, the organisation can’t absorb the work. LeoTrace is the three of them fixing that.
In addition to LeoPrevent, the company is developing LeoBench, which measures how securely major coding agents write—contamination-free, published and versioned as models change. Across the models tested, LeoPrevent removes roughly half the vulnerabilities that would otherwise have shipped.
About LeoTrace
LeoTrace makes AI coding agents write secure code. Its product, LeoPrevent, runs inside the coding agent and removes security flaws before code reaches a human reviewer. Founded in 2026 and based in the UK, LeoTrace has a team across the UK, Spain, and the Netherlands, and is already in production with tier-1 financial institutions in the UK and US.
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