Kevin Mandia raises record $190M for Armadin to fight AI-driven cyberattacks with autonomous agents

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

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. TechCrunch has reached out to the company for more information.

Kevin Mandia sold his cybersecurity company to Google in 2022. He has a fresh $190 million for a new venture

Four years ago Kevin Mandia agreed to sell his cybersecurity company Mandiant to Google for $5.4 billion. Now he's back in the game, with Google's help. On Tuesday, Mandia's new startup, Armadin, said it raised nearly $190 million, in a funding round led by Accel. Google Ventures is participating, along with firms including Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures and Ballistic Ventures, which Mandia co-founded. Mandia told CNBC in an interview that the emergence of artificial intelligence, particularly agentic AI, is having a dramatic impact on cybersecurity. Armadin creates and manages autonomous AI agents that consistently scan for threats. "I wasn't going to sit on the sidelines watching another shift change in cybersecurity without leveraging 30 years in the industry to do something," Mandia said. Across the tech world, companies are offering more AI-enabled tools and acquiring cyber capabilities in a scramble to supercharge their defenses as attacks rise in sophistication, speed, and intensity. Mandia co-founded Armadin in September and, in the past six months, the company has hired over 60 employees and started working with Fortune 100 companies. Mandia said Armadin is using agentic tools to complete tasks that previously took days in a matter of minutes. He said the company's name came to him in the middle of the night, while reflecting on the 1588 Spanish Armada. "Somehow my brain remembered eighth-grade history," he said.

Kevin Mandia's Armadin raises record $189.9M to develop AI-driven cyberattack simulation software - SiliconANGLE

Kevin Mandia's Armadin raises record $189.9M to develop AI-driven cyberattack simulation software Artificial intelligence-native cybersecurity company Armadin Inc. announced today that it had raised a cybersecurity industry record $189.9 million in seed and Series A funding to expand engineering and research teams, further develop the AI-driven attack simulation platform and scale its deployment in enterprise environments. Founded in 2024 and led by Kevin Mandia (pictured), the founder of Mandiant Inc., which was sold to Google LLC for $5.4 billion in 2022, Armadin offers software that is designed to identify and validate exploitable weaknesses in enterprise environments by simulating real-world attack behavior. Armadin's platform challenges the issue whereby traditional vulnerability scanning and risk scoring systems often produce large volumes of theoretical findings that do not necessarily represent practical attack paths. The company's architecture instead focuses on continuously modeling adversary behavior using automated agents that attempt to compromise systems in ways similar to human attackers. "The AI shift is changing cybersecurity more rapidly than any transition in history," explains Chief Executive Officer Kevin Mandia. "In a world of machine-speed attacks, defense must become autonomous. You cannot have a human in the loop for every defense decision and expect to win. We are building the most formidable offense to give organizations the greatest defense. It's important to national security." The technology works by using distributed artificial intelligence agents that emulate different phases of a cyberattack, including reconnaissance, privilege escalation, lateral movement and exploitation of exposed services. The agents interact with enterprise infrastructure in a controlled environment to probe systems, configurations and identities. The idea is that by chaining together multiple steps that mirror real attack techniques, the platform can identify combinations of weaknesses that could be used to gain access or move deeper into a network. The company's platform produces validated attack paths and evidence of how systems could be compromised and, in doing so, allows security teams to observe how vulnerabilities interact across environments. The results generated by the platform are compiled into reports and dashboards that map attack sequences, affected assets and potential impact. The system can also continuously repeat simulations to allow organizations to test how changes in infrastructure, software updates or security controls affect the ability of an attacker to progress through a network. Armadin's software is designed to operate across modern enterprise environments that include cloud infrastructure, internal networks, identity systems and externally exposed services. The system works with existing security tooling and enterprise infrastructure to collect configuration data and credentials needed to perform simulations. The seed and Series A rounds were led by Accel Partners LP, with GV Management Company, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Menlo Ventures LP, In-Q-Tel Inc., 8VC Management and Ballistic Ventures also participating. "Armadin is the first company we've seen that truly weaponizes the attacker's perspective to build a more resilient defense," said Ping Li, partner at Accel. "By combining Kevin's unrivaled operational experience with a generational AI engineering team, Armadin is delivering the autonomous, comprehensive system of record for an enterprise's security posture that boards and CISOs have been demanding for years."

Armadin Raises Record $190 Million to Combat AI-Driven Cyberattacks | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The company's combined seed and Series A funding round is said to be the largest such financing round in cybersecurity history and will help Armadin in its goal of combating "hyperattacks," which are "sophisticated, multi-modal campaigns that move at machine-speed," the release said. To combat this, Armadin's platform offers specialized artificial intelligence agents that employ "custom models in an agentic attacker swarm," per the release. These agents continuously reason, plan and adapt like the fraudsters to give companies "decision-grade proof of what can actually be exploited." "The AI shift is changing cybersecurity more rapidly than any transition in history," Armadin CEO Kevin Mandia said in the release. "In a world of machine-speed attacks, defense must become autonomous. You cannot have a human in the loop for every defense decision and expect to win. We are building the most formidable offense to give organizations the greatest defense. It's important to national security." Mandia is the former CEO of cybersecurity firm Mandiant, which was acquired by Google in 2022 for $5.4 billion. Armadin's founding team includes veterans of both companies. The new funding round came as "offensive" AI models are rewriting the way companies deploy their defensive counterparts, PYMNTS reported last month. According to the World Economic Forum, 87% of organizations said AI-related vulnerabilities are increasing risk across their environments. "The threat landscape has shifted from AI as a tool to AI as an operation embedded throughout the attack lifecycle," PYMNTS added. Meanwhile, Gartner projected that by next year, 17% of cyberattacks will employ generative AI, a sign that AI-driven techniques are shifting from experimentation to mainstream threat capability. "The result is compounding scale and variability," the report said. "Artificial intelligence systems can generate unique attack instances while pursuing the same objective, weakening signature-based detection models that rely on pattern repetition. When each payload or prompt sequence is slightly different, static defenses struggle to keep pace."

Mandiant Founder Kevin Mandia Raises $189.9M for Armadin Security Startup

Kevin Mandia Launches Armadin With $189.9m to Build Autonomous AI Agents for Cyber Defense Kevin Mandia has launched a new cybersecurity company, Armadin, with $189.9 million in combined seed and Series A funding. The company announced the financing on March 10 and described it as a record combined raise for an early-stage cybersecurity startup. Armadin plans to build autonomous AI agents that identify exploitable risks and help companies respond faster to cyber threats. Mandia founded Mandiant in 2004 and sold the company to Google for $5.4 billion in 2022. Armadin marks his return to cybersecurity at a time when attack methods are becoming faster and more automated. The startup says it is building for a market shaped by agentic AI and machine-speed cyberattacks.