Stephen Ward, the former US Secret Service agent turned cybersecurity investor, is raising a second fund of roughly $250 million for Brightmind Partners, the New York venture firm he co-founded in 2024. This time he is doing it alone, as the firm's sole general partner, after co-founder Gur Talpaz left in April.
Ward's debut fund closed at $250 million late last year, and the new raise targets roughly the same size, TechCrunch reported. His career has run through some of cybersecurity's most unusual corners: in the Secret Service he arrested a hacker and then spent 18 months clearing his own name, before serving as chief information security officer at Home Depot and TIAA. He was also an early backer of Wiz, the cloud security company Google acquired for $32 billion last year.
A fast exit, then a split
Brightmind's first fund has made 14 investments and has one exit so far, and it was a quick one. Identity-security startup SGNL, which CrowdStrike agreed to buy for $740 million in January, was sold just 11 months after Brightmind led its Series A. Ward's philosophy is blunt: "You have to sell on the way up." Most portfolio companies will never go public, he argues, so selling early beats waiting for an initial public offering that may never come.
The partnership that launched Brightmind ended this spring. Talpaz and another early colleague, Tayler Sipperly, left in April, leaving Ward as the firm's sole general partner. In August, Talpaz and Sipperly co-founded a rival firm, Cognition, with Elia Zaitsev, CrowdStrike's global chief technology officer for the past three years. Cognition is reportedly targeting a $170 million first fund to back cybersecurity startups.
Early-stage cyber is out-raising the later rounds
Ward is raising at a moment when early-stage cybersecurity startups are attracting more money than their later-stage rivals for the first time in more than a decade. PitchBook counts $4.7 billion in seed-through-Series B deals through September 2026, already more than the total for all of 2025, even though the number of deals fell to 248 from 358 last year. Seed rounds in particular are ballooning: the average cybersecurity seed round jumped to $8.4 million in the first nine months of this year, from $5.54 million a year earlier.
Ward is sceptical of some of the hype, however. His team's manual review found only 30 of the 278 deals PitchBook bucketed as AI security in the first half of 2026 were genuinely AI-security companies. The second fund will not be exclusively focused on cybersecurity either: about 20 percent will go to AI infrastructure deals, and Ward expects a meaningful number of teams to come from Israel.
Selling on the way up
Brightmind is a small operation — five people, including chief operating officer Iva Messy, who joined from venture firms Felicis and Andreessen Horowitz. The question now is whether a solo general partner can turn one well-timed exit and a network built across the Secret Service, Fortune 500 security teams and CrowdStrike's orbit into a durable firm. Fundraising has begun, with no committed amount disclosed yet, and Ward is betting on himself to do it.
