Artificial intelligence-native cybersecurity company Armadin Inc. announced today that it has raised a cybersecurity industry-record $189.9 million in seed and Series A funding to expand engineering and research teams, further develop the AI-driven attack simulation platform and scale up its deployment in enterprise environments.

Founded in 2024, the company is led by Chief Executive Kevin Mandia (pictured), the founder of Mandiant Inc., which was sold to Google LLC for $5.4 billion in 2022. Armadin offers software designed to identify and validate exploitable weaknesses in enterprise environments by simulating real-world attack behavior.

Armadin’s platform challenges the issue whereby traditional vulnerability scanning and risk scoring systems often produce large volumes of theoretical findings that do not necessarily represent practical attack paths. The company’s architecture instead focuses on continuously modeling adversary behavior using automated agents that attempt to compromise systems in ways similar to human attackers.

“The AI shift is changing cybersecurity more rapidly than any transition in history,” explained Mandia. “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. We are building the most formidable offense to give organizations the greatest defense. It’s important to national security.”

The technology works by using distributed artificial intelligence agents that emulate different phases of a cyberattack, including reconnaissance, privilege escalation, lateral movement and exploitation of exposed services. The agents interact with enterprise infrastructure in a controlled environment to probe systems, configurations and identities.

The idea is that by chaining together multiple steps that mirror real attack techniques, the platform can identify combinations of weaknesses that could be used to gain access or move deeper into a network.

The company’s platform produces validated attack paths and evidence of how systems could be compromised, thus allowing security teams to observe how vulnerabilities interact across environments. The results generated by the platform are compiled into reports and dashboards that map attack sequences, affected assets and potential impact. The system can also continuously repeat simulations to allow organizations to test how changes in infrastructure, software updates or security controls affect the ability of an attacker to progress through a network.

Armadin’s software is designed to operate across modern enterprise environments that include cloud infrastructure, internal networks, identity systems and externally exposed services. The system works with existing security tooling and enterprise infrastructure to collect configuration data and credentials needed to perform simulations.

The seed and Series A rounds were led by Accel Partners LP, with GV Management Company, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Menlo Ventures LP, In-Q-Tel Inc., 8VC Management and Ballistic Ventures also participating.

“Armadin is the first company we’ve seen that truly weaponizes the attacker’s perspective to build a more resilient defense,” said Ping Li, a partner at Accel. “By combining Kevin’s unrivaled operational experience with a generational AI engineering team, Armadin is delivering the autonomous, comprehensive system of record for an enterprise’s security posture that boards and CISOs have been demanding for years.”

Photo: Armadin