Mandiant founder just raised $190 million for autonomous AI agent security startup

Kevin Mandiant, who founded 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 funding round.

The new organization, called Armadin, has raised $189.9 million in seed and Series A funding led by Accel, with participation from GV, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, 8VC, Ballistic Ventures, and CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel. The company claims the total amount is a record for an early-stage security startup, but did not disclose its valuation.

Other security startups have raised slightly larger Series A rounds, but we couldn’t find any that did so right away. For example, in 2019, 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 only 3 years old and in growth mode.

Prior to joining Armadin, Mr. Mandia, an internationally recognized security expert, was a VC at Ballistic Ventures. It’s a security-focused fund co-founded by Ted Schlein, a prominent security VC formerly of Kleiner Perkins.

Mandia founded Armadin to create autonomous cybersecurity agents, software designed to learn and respond to threats without human intervention. He told CNBC that he believes autonomous AI hackers are emerging and should be feared. Security researchers and government agencies have sounded similar alarms, warning that AI is already lowering the bar for launching sophisticated attacks.

“When you bring AI to the attacker side, what you get is a technology that can think, learn, and adapt,” he warned, adding that attackers will be able to complete attacks in minutes that previously took days.

Armadin aims to provide automated agents to white hats (aka the good guys) and arm them with their own army of agents to counter AI-powered attacks carried out by black hats (the bad guys). The co-founder of Armadin’s Mandia is Travis Lanham, a former Google Cloud Security principal engineer. Former Mandiant executive Evan Peña. David Slater, former Google SecOps engineer.

TechCrunch has reached out to the company for more information.