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

Kevin Mandia, who founded the cybersecurity startup Mandiant in 2004 and In 2022, he sold it to Google for $5.4 billionhas launched a new artificial intelligence homegrown cybersecurity startup in what the company claims is a record-breaking funding round.

New clothes, it’s called Armadinethere is attracted 189.9 million dollars In combined 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 combined amount is a record for an early-stage security startup, though it did not disclose the valuation.

While other security startups have raised slightly larger Series A rounds, we couldn’t find another that did so out of the gate. 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 three years old and already in growth mode.

Prior to Armadin, internationally recognized security expert Mandia was a VC at Ballistic Ventures. This is the security specialist foundation he co-founded famous security VC Ted Schleinformerly Kleiner Perkins.

Mandia founded Armadin to create autonomous cyber security agents, software designed to learn about and respond to threats without a human in the middle. He told CNBC he believes autonomous AI hackers are on the way and should be feared. Security researchers and government agencies have sounded similar alarms, warning that artificial intelligence is already lowering the bar for sophisticated attacks.

“When you have artificial intelligence in an attack, what you 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 (the good guy security experts) with automated agents to have their own army of agents to combat AI-powered attacks run by the black hats (the bad guys). Mandia’s co-founders at Armadin are former Google Cloud Security Senior Engineer Travis Lanham; former Mandiant executive Evan Peña; and former Google SecOps engineer David Slater.