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

Kevin Mandia, who founded cybersecurity startup Mandiant in 2004 and sold it to Google for $5.4 billion in 2022, has launched a new cybersecurity startup with what the company claims is a record funding round.

The new outfit, called Armadinraised $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 CIA venture arm In-Q-Tel; he said. The company claims the combined total is a record for a security startup at this early stage, although it did not disclose its valuation.

While other security startups have raised even slightly larger Series A rounds, we couldn’t find another that did so out of the gate. In 2019, for example, password manager 1Password and privacy compliance firm 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, was a VC at Ballistic Ventures. This is the special security fund co-founded by famous 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 he told CNBC that he believes autonomous AI hackers are on the way and that we should fear them. Security researchers and government agencies have sounded similar alarms, warning that artificial intelligence is already lowering the bar for launching sophisticated attacks.

“When you have artificial intelligence in an attack, what you’re going to get is a technology that can think, that can learn, that can adapt,” he warned, adding that attackers will be able to complete attacks in minutes that used to take days.

Armadin aims to provide white hats (aka good security experts) with automated agents so they can have their own agency armies to combat AI-powered attacks run by black hats (bad guys). 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.

TechCrunch has reached out to the company for more information.