Kevin Mandia, the man best known for founding cybersecurity firm Mandiant and then selling it to Google for $5.4 billion in 2022, has raised $255.5 million for his latest venture, Armadin, at a valuation north of $2.5 billion. The company announced the round on Thursday, presumably after making sure nobody had already hacked the press release.

The Series B was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, with Bain Capital Ventures, Redpoint, 8VC, Ballistic Ventures, Google Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Kleiner Perkins, and Menlo Ventures also joining in. That's nine firms for those keeping score, or roughly one investor for every $28.4 million.

The new round arrives just six months after Armadin raised a $190 million Series A in March, bringing total funding to more than $445 million. At this pace, the company will have raised the GDP of a small nation by next Tuesday.

So what does Armadin actually do? It offers enterprises a new kind of always-on security by reimagining defense testing for the AI era. Instead of traditional penetration tests - where hired guns attempt to break in and then write a report about the weaknesses they found, often weeks after the fact - Armadin runs always-on agentic swarms that chain together vulnerabilities to hack in. The idea is to help organizations find and seal holes before any bad guys, or even AI labs with rogue agents, can use agentic tech against them.

In other words: the company's pitch is that it will hack you continuously and without mercy, which is either deeply comforting or the plot of a movie where the security consultant is the villain. Either way, investors seem satisfied.