Armadin Inc. said it has raised $255.5 million in a Series B funding round that values the cybersecurity startup at more than $2.5 billion. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, with participation from Alphabet Inc.'s GV startup fund, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures and other investors. The company, founded last year, is led by prominent cybersecurity entrepreneur Kevin Mandia.
Mandia previously launched Mandiant Inc., a breach investigation company that Alphabet acquired in 2022 for $5.4 billion. He is also a co-founder of Ballistic Ventures, a cybersecurity-focused startup fund that backed Armadin's newly closed round.
Armadin's platform uses swarms of artificial intelligence agents to locate weak points in corporate infrastructure. According to the company, the agents run inside a sandbox that blocks potentially harmful activity, and their findings are used to help customers strengthen their cybersecurity defenses. Armadin says the platform can generate tens of thousands of AI agents during an evaluation.
In a first phase, the swarm maps an organization's internal systems and users, then scans those assets for vulnerabilities. Armadin claims its agents can chain multiple vulnerabilities together to carry out cyberattacks. In one customer project, the company spun up no fewer than 26,000 agents that scanned more than 25,000 of the client's assets and identified 38 verified attack paths, which are sequences of malicious actions that can lead to a breach. Armadin describes that exercise as the largest autonomous AI attack on record.
The technology arrives as agent swarms have carried out several high-profile breaches in recent months. Their effectiveness stems partly from the ability to parallelize tasks: a hundred agents can run a hundred vulnerability scans at once, far faster than performing them sequentially, leaving companies less time to block a threat. Agent swarms also can share findings within the group to sharpen their hacking skills. The rogue OpenAI Group PBC agents behind the Hugging Face Inc. breach used that approach, creating an impromptu forum to exchange access credentials and debate tactics.
Armadin says its platform also produces remediation advice, flagging high-severity items so cybersecurity teams address them first. Mandia said offense currently holds a unique advantage because AI lets an attacker find and chain weaknesses faster than any human team can respond, and that the only way to build a defense that keeps pace is to train it daily against the best available offense. Armadin will use the new funds to accelerate research, AI training and go-to-market programs.
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