Startup Mandiant just raised $190M for its AI security startup

Kevin Mandia, who founded the cybersecurity startup Mandiant in 2004 and sold to Google for $5.4 billion in 2022has launched a new AI-native cybersecurity strategy with what the company says is reputational damage.

The new outfit, called Armadinraised $189.9 million in 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 says that all of the included data is a record of the first security startup, although it does not disclose its valuation.

While other security startups have raised slightly larger Series A lines, we haven’t found another that has done so right out of the gate. In 2019, for example, password management company 1Password and privacy tracking 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 growing.

Before Armadin, Mandia, a world-renowned security expert, was a VC at Ballistic Ventures. It is a fund of security experts founded by well-known security VC Ted Schleinformerly 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 they believe independent AI hackers are on the way and should be feared. Security researchers and government agencies have raised similar alarms, warning that AI is already lowering the bar for creating sophisticated threats.

“When you have AI on offense, what you’re going to get is technology that can think, it can learn, it can adapt,” he warned, adding that attackers would be able to complete an attack in minutes that would take days.

Armadin aims to empower white hats (professional security experts) and self-help groups to have their own armies to counter AI-powered black hats (bad guys). Mandia’s co-founders at Armadin are Google Cloud Security senior engineer Travis Lanham; Evan Peña formerly of Mandiant; and former Google SecOps engineer David Slater.

TechCrunch has reached out to the company for more information.