Mandiant’s founder just raised $190M for his autonomous AI agent security startup

Mandiant’s founder just raised $190M for his autonomous AI agent security startup

Kevin Mandia, who based the cybersecurity startup Mandiant in 2004 and offered it to Google for $5.4 billion in 2022, has launched a new AI-native cybersecurity startup with what the company claims is a record-breaking funding round.

The new outfit, called Armadin, has raised $189.9 million in mixed seed and Series A funding led by Accel, with participation from GV, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, 8VC, Ballistic Ventures, and the CIA’s enterprise arm, In-Q-Tel. The company claims the mixed complete is a report for a security startup at that early a stage, though it isn’t disclosing its valuation.

While other security startups have raised even barely greater Series A rounds, we couldn’t discover another one that did so out of the gate. In 2019, for instance, password-management company 1Password and privateness compliance company OneTrust each raised $200 million in Series A funding. But 1Password was already 14 years outdated at the time and OneTrust was three years outdated and already in development mode.

Prior to Armadin, Mandia, an internationally acknowledged security professional, had been a VC at Ballistic Ventures. That’s the security specialist fund co-founded by famed security VC Ted Schlein, previously of Kleiner Perkins.

Mandia based Armadin to create autonomous cybersecurity brokers, software designed to study and reply to threats without a human in the center. He told CNBC that he believes autonomous AI hackers are on the method and that they’re to be feared. Security researchers and authorities businesses have raised related alarms, warning that AI is already decreasing the bar for launching refined assaults.

“When you have AI on offense, what you are going to get is a technology that can think, can learn, can adapt,” he warned, including that the attackers will have the ability to full assaults in minutes that used to take days.

Armadin goals to offer the white hats (aka good-guy security specialists) automated brokers so that have their very own agentic armies to fight AI-powered assaults run by the black hats (unhealthy guys). Mandia’s co-founders at Armadin are former Google Cloud Security principal engineer Travis Lanham; former Mandiant exec Evan Peña; and former Google SecOps engineer David Slater.

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