Mandiant founder secures $190M for autonomous AI cybersecurity startup

Kevin Mandia, who founded cybersecurity company Mandiant in 2004 and later sold it to Google for $5.4 billion in 2022, has unveiled a new AI-native cybersecurity startup backed by what the company says is a record-setting early-stage funding round.

The new company, called Armadin, said it has raised $189.9 million across its seed and Series A financing, with the round led by Accel and participation from GV, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, 8VC, Ballistic Ventures, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm. Armadin says that the combined figure represents a record for a security startup at such an early stage, although the company is not disclosing its valuation.

While some other cybersecurity startups have raised slightly larger Series A rounds, it is difficult to find another company that pulled in that much funding right from the start. In 2019, for instance, password-management company 1Password and privacy compliance company OneTrust each raised $200 million in Series A funding. But by that point, 1Password had already been around for 14 years, and OneTrust was three years old and already moving well beyond its earliest phase.

Before launching Armadin, Mandia — widely regarded as one of the most recognised figures in cybersecurity — had been working as a venture capitalist at Ballistic Ventures. That firm is the security-focused investment fund co-founded by veteran security investor Ted Schlein, formerly of Kleiner Perkins.

Mandia started Armadin to build autonomous cybersecurity agents, software systems meant to learn from threats and respond to them without requiring a human operator in the middle of the process. He told CNBC that he believes autonomous AI hackers are coming and that the threat they pose should be taken seriously. Security researchers and government officials have voiced similar concerns, warning that AI is already making it easier for attackers to launch more advanced operations.

“When you have AI on offence, what you are going to get is a technology that can think, can learn, can adapt,” Mandia said, warning that attackers could soon carry out in minutes operations that once took days.

Armadin aims to equip the white hats — the defensive cybersecurity experts — with automated agents of their own, effectively giving them agentic forces to counter AI-powered attacks launched by black hats, or malicious actors. Mandia’s co-founders at Armadin include former Google Cloud Security principal engineer Travis Lanham, former Mandiant executive Evan Peña, and former Google SecOps engineer David Slater.