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, it said. 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) with automated agents so they 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.