San Francisco: Armadin, an AI-native cybersecurity startup founded by Mandiant creator Kevin Mandia, has raised $189.9 million in combined seed and Series A funding, the largest combined early-stage raise in cybersecurity history.
The round was led by Accel, with participation from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, 8VC, Ballistic Ventures, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm. The company launched quietly in September 2025 and has already hired more than 60 employees and begun working with several Fortune 100 companies as early customers.
Mandia is one of the most recognized figures in enterprise security. He founded Mandiant in 2004, sold it to FireEye for $1 billion in 2014, and then watched Google acquire the combined entity for $5.4 billion in 2022.
Armadin marks his return as a founder, and his co-founders carry similarly deep credentials. Travis Lanham was a principal engineer at Google Cloud Security. Evan Peña is a former Mandiant executive. David Slater was a Google SecOps engineer. The team’s combined background spans three decades of offensive and defensive security operations at the highest levels.
Armadin’s core thesis is that the era of human-paced cyber defense is over. The company describes a new threat category it calls hyperattacks sophisticated, multi-modal campaigns that move at machine speed, executing in minutes what once took human attackers days.
Its platform deploys specialized AI agents that operate as an autonomous attacker swarm, continuously reasoning, planning, and adapting across enterprise networks to identify what can actually be exploited before real attackers do. The approach is designed to give security teams decision-grade intelligence rather than theoretical vulnerability lists, with every finding backed by auditable reasoning chains.
The raise arrives as AI-focused cybersecurity investment surges, with AI-native security firms accounting for more than half of global cybersecurity VC deals by late 2025. The broader cybersecurity market is projected to exceed $560 billion by 2032 at a 14% compound annual growth rate.
Armadin enters a field that is rapidly filling with well-funded competitors, JetStream Security launched with $34 million in seed funding just weeks earlier, while Fig Security emerged from stealth with $38 million. But few carry the founder pedigree or the intelligence community backing that Armadin brings to its launch.
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