Armadin raises $255.5M at $2.5B valuation six months after Series A

Armadin announced the close on Thursday, according to TechCrunch. Andreessen Horowitz and Accel led the round, with Bain Capital Ventures, Redpoint, 8VC, Ballistic Ventures, Google Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Kleiner Perkins and Menlo Ventures joining. Reuters put the valuation at more than $2.5 billion in its own write-up on 1 October. Two outlets, one number, no daylight between them.

What Armadin sells is not a scanner. The company's pitch, as TechCrunch describes it, is always-on agentic swarms that chain vulnerabilities together to break into enterprise systems continuously, rather than a penetration test booked months in advance. Mandia founded Mandiant, which Google bought for $5.4 billion in 2022, and the new company is betting that defensive testing has to run at the same speed as the offensive tooling it is meant to catch. That bet is what the $255.5 million is funding, and it is why the round closed so soon after the last one, a point TechCrunch makes in its coverage of the announcement.

Europe's security money moves too

The same week, Tech.eu reported that Osavul, a Ukrainian-founded startup that scans open-source and online data for disinformation campaigns and hostile activity, raised €8.5 million in a Series A led by 33N Ventures. Balnord, G+D Ventures and existing investor 42CAP participated. Osavul has now raised around €12 million in total. Its tools are used by NATO and by governments and defence enterprises, and the company says the new money goes toward enterprise clients and government and defence work.

Co-founder and CEO Dmytro Plieshakov said in the announcement: "Hybrid attacks are no longer a government problem alone. The companies running energy, airports, ports, transport and finance now face the same adversaries, usually without the means to see them coming."

Osavul was co-founded by Ukrainians Plieshakov and Dmytro Bilash and developed in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The two raises point in opposite directions geographically but the same direction strategically. Armadin is selling continuous, agent-driven testing to enterprises that already have security budgets. Osavul is selling early-warning intelligence to organisations that mostly do not. Both are raising on the argument that AI has made attack surfaces move faster than the annual audit cycle.

Not only security

Money is moving elsewhere too. Endpoints News reported on 1 October that Medicare Advantage insurer and medical group Devoted Health raised nearly $1.2 billion after enrolling hundreds of thousands of new senior members. PadSplit, an Atlanta coliving startup, said on Thursday it is expanding into the San Francisco Bay Area, the New York metro area and Chicago, according to The Next Web, without disclosing how much money or how many homes the arrangement covers.

Health and housing rounds of that size sit alongside the security deals in the same 48-hour window. That is not a pattern yet, but it is a lot of capital looking for somewhere to land before the quarter closes.

On the infrastructure side, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said at a Washington tech summit on Tuesday that the space company's first outside funding round is "oversubscribed" and not yet closed, CNBC reported. The Wall Street Journal had reported last week that Blue Origin raised $10 billion at a $140 billion valuation, with Jeff Bezos contributing $2 billion. Limp did not confirm the final numbers. The company had been fully funded by Bezos since its founding in 2000.