Armadin
By Kevin Mandia, Co-founder & General Partner, Ballistic Ventures; CEO, Armadin
We are entering the era of AI-driven Hyperattacks: sophisticated, multi-vector campaigns that move at machine-speed. Such attacks are inevitable. Adversaries are already experimenting with AI agents that can reason, adapt, and scale. As foundation models improve, these capabilities will only accelerate. Soon, deploying a swarm of offensive AI agents will not be limited to nation-states. It will be democratized.
When attacks move at machine speed, defense must become autonomous. It will not be feasible to have a human in the loop for every defensive decision and expect to win.
That’s why I started Armadin.
Today, Armadin is launching with $189.9 million in Seed and Series A funding – the largest combined early-stage raise in cybersecurity history – with our Seed led by my founding partners here at Ballistic Ventures, and the Series A led by Accel, with participation from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, and follow-on support from 8VC and Ballistic Ventures. This level of conviction reflects what we believe to be a defining moment for our industry.
At Armadin, we are building the ultimate attacker.
Not a scanner. Not another dashboard. Not incremental automation layered onto legacy workflows. We built an agentic attacker swarm that can find all ways in, all the time, across all modalities, at scale, with total recall of prior findings.
Our platform deploys a fleet of specialized AI models that continuously reason, plan, and adapt like elite human adversaries. These agents don’t just look for theoretical vulnerabilities. They pursue real kill chains across the entire attack surface and provide decision-grade proof of what can actually be exploited.
That distinction matters. Boards and CEOs don’t want lists of vulnerabilities. They want to know: Are we secure? If not, what do we fix first?
Traditional red teaming is manual, episodic, and constrained by human capacity. Even the best red teams cannot operate inside every network, 24/7, at machine speed. Meanwhile, attackers are scaling.
Armadin exists to close this gap.
We are taking decades of human-led red teaming expertise and reinforcing it into AI systems. Armadin Co-founders Travis Lanham and David Slater bring deep AI and product engineering expertise. Evan Peña brings elite offensive tradecraft. Together, we are training AI agents to the standards of world-class red team operators and then unleashing them to test defenses continuously.
This is about national security.
I’ve seen firsthand how adversaries operate. I’ve seen the impact when defenders are outpaced. The AI shift is changing cybersecurity more rapidly than any transition in history. If we do not match machine-speed offense with machine-speed defense, we will lose ground quickly – as enterprises and as a nation.
The future of cybersecurity will not be defined by who has the best dashboard. It will be defined by who can most accurately simulate the adversary, at scale, continuously, and autonomously.
We are building the most formidable offense to give organizations the strongest possible defense. We intend to become the seal of approval to test and train an organization’s defense until the defensive posture can withstand our attacks autonomously with confidence.
That’s why I started Armadin. And we are just getting started.