The founder of Mandiant just raised $190 million for his independent AI client 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-driven cybersecurity startup with what the company claims is a record funding round.

The new group, 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 the CIA’s investment arm In-Q-Tel. The company claims the combined total is a record for a security startup at such an early stage, though it does not disclose its valuation.

While other security startups have raised slightly larger Series A rounds, we couldn’t find another company that did so out of the gate. In 2019, for example, password management company 1Password and privacy compliance company OneTrust 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 joining Armadin, Mandia, an internationally recognized security expert, held a venture capital position at Ballistic Ventures. This is a security specialist fund co-founded by famous security VC Ted Shlein, who formerly worked at 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 told CNBC that he believes autonomous AI hackers are on the way and should be feared. Security researchers and government agencies have raised similar alarms, warning that AI is already starting to lower the bar for launching sophisticated attacks.

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

Armadin aims to equip white hats (aka the good security experts) with robotic agents so that they can have their own agent armies to combat AI-powered attacks run by black hats (the bad guys). Mandia’s co-founders at Armadin are former Google Cloud Security principal architect Travis Lanham; former Mandiant CEO Evan Peña; and former Google SecOps engineer David Slater.

TechCrunch has reached out to the company for more information.