Kevin Mandia, founder of the previously sold Mandiant, has launched a new AI-native cybersecurity startup called Armadin. The company has raised a combined $189.9 million in seed and Series A funding, which it claims is a record for a security startup at such an early stage.
Armadin's mission is to develop autonomous AI cybersecurity agents to defend against threats. Mandia warns that AI-powered offensive attacks are an emerging and serious danger, necessitating such automated defensive systems.
The main topics covered are the launch and record funding of Armadin, its focus on autonomous AI defense agents, and the perceived threat of AI-powered cyber attacks.
Kevin Mandia, who founded the cybersecurity startup Mandiant in 2004 and sold 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 combined seed and Series A funding led by Accel, with participation from GV, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, 8VC, Ballistic Ventures, and the CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel. The company claims the combined total is a record for a security startup at that early a stage, though it isn’t disclosing its valuation.
While other security startups have raised even slightly bigger Series A rounds, we couldn’t find another one that did so out of the gate. In 2019, for example, password-management company 1Password and privacy compliance company OneTrust both raised $200 million in Series A funding. But 1Password was already 14 years old at the time and OneTrust was three years old and already in growth mode.
Prior to Armadin, Mandia, an internationally recognized security expert, had been a VC at Ballistic Ventures. That’s the security specialist fund co-founded by famed security VC Ted Schlein, formerly of Kleiner Perkins.
Mandia founded Armadin to create autonomous cybersecurity agents, software designed to learn and respond to threats without a human in the middle. He told CNBC that he believes autonomous AI hackers are on the way and that they are to be feared. Security researchers and government agencies have raised similar alarms, warning that AI is already lowering the bar for launching sophisticated attacks.
“When you have AI on offense, what you are going to get is a technology that can think, can learn, can adapt,” he warned, adding that the attackers will be able to complete attacks in minutes that used to take days.
Armadin aims to provide the white hats (aka good-guy security experts) automated agents so that have their own agentic armies to combat AI-powered attacks run by the black hats (bad 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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