Building Defense for the Agentic Era: Kevin Mandia

a16z General Partner David George sits down with Armadin founder and CEO Kevin Mandia to discuss what happens to cybersecurity when attackers can operate at machine speed. After 30 years in security and building Mandiant, Kevin says AI convinced him to get back on the field. He explains how AI changes the economics of cyberattacks, allowing attackers to probe thousands of paths simultaneously, and why that means defense will ultimately need to become autonomous too. They also unpack Armadin’s approach: continuously attacking customers’ systems with AI to find exploitable vulnerabilities before adversaries do, then building toward autonomous defenses that can respond in real time. Kevin shares what Armadin has learned from finding more than 90 zero-days in production environments this year, why humans can’t remain in the detect-and-respond loop, and how the entire security stack could change over the next few years.