In the history of technology, there is a recurring pattern: humans invent a tool to accelerate progress, only to be overwhelmed by the complexity that acceleration creates. We are currently at that inflection point with software. Tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and autonomous agents are pouring gasoline on the fire of productivity. But as any physicist will tell you, speed without direction is just a faster path to entropy.

The industry is currently obsessed with "The Hammer"—the generative models that spit out code at superhuman speeds. But at Marathon, we’ve been looking for "The Blueprint." Today, we are thrilled to announce that we are leading a €1.1M Seed round for Straion, the governance layer for the AI-driven future of software.

The Problem of "Faster Chaos"

The dirty secret of the AI coding boom is that while it makes individual developers faster, it is making organizations slower.

Enterprise software isn't just a collection of logic; it is a delicate web of institutional knowledge, security mandates, and architectural constraints. Current AI agents are context-blind. They can write a function, but they don't know your specific PII masking protocols or why your infrastructure team bans certain library patterns.

We are witnessing the birth of "Faster Chaos." Organizations are trading development time for a massive, looming "Code Review Bottleneck" where seniors spend their days babysitting AI hallucinations. If we don't solve the context problem, the productivity gains of AI will be swallowed whole by the technical debt it creates.

Straion: The Rules Layer

Enter Straion. Founded by Lukas Holzer, Fabian Friedl, and Katrin Freihofner—a team that spent years at Dynatrace witnessing the complexities of global-scale systems—Straion is building the missing piece of the puzzle.

They aren't building another AI that writes code. They are building the machine-learning-powered platform that tells AI how to write code according to your rules.

Straion transforms static, rotting documentation into active, machine-readable guardrails. It doesn't wait for a human to find a mistake in a pull request. It validates the AI’s plan before a single line of code is committed. It provides the "organizational DNA" that ensures every piece of code—human or machine—is compliant, secure, and resilient by design.

Bet on the Direction, Not the Noise

At Marathon, we look for founders who see the second-order effects of a revolution.

While the world competes on the size of context windows, Straion is winning on the precision of context. By filtering the signal from the noise and delivering only the relevant standards to the coding agent at the right millisecond, they are enabling true, governed autonomy.

The stakes are binary: either we build a layer of governance for AI-generated software, or we let our digital infrastructure collapse under the weight of its own unverified complexity.

Lukas, Fabian, and Katrin have the technical pedigree to ensure the former. We are proud to back them as they build the most important layer in the modern dev stack.

The future of software is autonomous, but only if it’s governed.

Straion is the governing layer for coding agents providing the blueprints and guardrails for modern enterprise adoption

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