Kevin Mandia, who previously founded Mandiant and sold the incident response and threat intelligence firm to FireEye in a $1 billion deal in 2014 before its later $5.4 billion acquisition by Google, has launched a new cybersecurity startup.
San Francisco based Armadin announced a massive Seed and Series A Funding round of $189.9M in what is effectively its public launch (the firm has simultaneously published a blog by Mandia titled Introducing Armadin).
Armadin uses AI-powered red teaming to find and exploit weaknesses in the same way that attackers attack them.
The funding was led by Accel, with participation from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and follow-on investment from 8VC and Ballistic Ventures — and is claimed to be the largest seed and series A funding in cybersecurity history.
The firm was first announced quietly in late 2025 with an initial seed of $24 million. Now, with the formal launch, Mandia’s co-founders have been named as Travis Lanham (CTO), Evan Peña (chief offensive security officer), and David Slater (chief architect). Mandia is CEO.
Armadin can be described as a red team on steroids. The steroids are AI. “I believe within the next few years virtually all cyberattacks will be AI-based – swarming, tailored, and relentless,” writes Mandia in his blog. “They will be untethered to human limitations and capable to execute on a scale we have never witnessed before.”
Armadin intends to fight fire with fire. “In a world of machine-speed attacks, defense must become autonomous. You cannot have a human in the loop for every defense decision and expect to win,” he adds in the ‘launch’ document. We are building the most formidable offense to give organizations the greatest defense. It’s important to national security.”
The ‘formidable offense’ comes from a team of specialist red teamers and AI researchers and engineers. The intent is to provide a platform that can perform AI-directed offensive security as fast as attackers can attack – to close or at least reduce the traditional agility gap – with its own autonomous, agentic attacker swarm.
“Before Armadin, you could not put a nation state level adversary inside every network 24/7,” said Lanham. “We’ve built the ultimate attacker – it doesn’t just follow a script, it reasons and learns as it swarms your defenses. We train our models and build agents to the standards of a world-class red team with safety at the foundation and unleash them to identify exploitable risk at machine speed.”
Traditional red teaming cannot cope with the dawning age of AI-driven attacks. Armadin intends to solve this with AI red teaming.
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