Armadin raises $190M to build autonomous AI security agents

Kevin Mandia, who founded the cybersecurity company Mandiant in 2004 and sold it to Google for $5.4 billion in 2022, has launched a new cybersecurity startup called Armadin. The company has secured $189.9 million in combined seed and Series A funding. Armadin claims the combined total is a record for a security startup at that early a stage, though it is not disclosing its valuation.

While other security startups have raised slightly larger Series A rounds, they did so much later in their corporate lifecycles. For context, in 2019, password-management company 1Password and privacy compliance company OneTrust both raised $200 million in Series A funding. However, 1Password was already 14 years old at the time of its funding, and OneTrust was three years old and in growth mode. Armadin, by contrast, secured its capital right out of the gate.

Prior to launching Armadin, Mandia, an internationally recognized security expert, served as a venture capitalist at Ballistic Ventures. That security-specialist fund was co-founded by Ted Schlein, formerly of Kleiner Perkins. Armadin’s record-breaking round was led by Accel, with participation from:

• GV
• Kleiner Perkins
• Menlo Ventures
• 8VC
• Ballistic Ventures
• In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA

Mandia founded Armadin to create autonomous cybersecurity agents, which are software systems designed to learn and respond to threats without a human in the middle. He warned that autonomous AI hackers are on the way and that they are to be feared. “When you have AI on offense, what you are going to get is a technology that can think, can learn, can adapt,” warned Mandia, the founder of Armadin. Security researchers and government agencies have raised similar alarms, reporting that AI is already lowering the bar for launching sophisticated attacks.

To provide a defense, Armadin aims to equip white hats—good-guy security experts—with automated agents so they have their own agentic armies to combat AI-powered attacks run by the black hats. Mandia’s co-founders at Armadin are former Google Cloud Security principal engineer Travis Lanham; former Mandiant executive Evan Peña; and former Google SecOps engineer David Slater.

Why it matters

Armadin’s massive early-stage funding highlights the intense investor appetite for AI-native cybersecurity solutions designed to counter the rising threat of autonomous, AI-driven attacks internationally.