The ex-Secret Service agent who flipped a hacker is now raising a second $250M cybersecurity fund

Summary

• Stephen Ward co-founded Brightmind Partners, a two-year-old New York cybersecurity fund, with a debut fund size of $250 million closed late last year.
• Ward advocates for selling portfolio companies on the way up rather than waiting for an IPO, a strategy evidenced by the $740 million sale of SGNL to CrowdStrike 11 months after Brightmind led its Series A.
• Ward previously served in the Coast Guard for four years in search and rescue, worked nine years in the Secret Service focusing on cyber investigations, and held CISO roles at TIAA and Home Depot.
• Ward is raising a second fund targeting roughly the same size as the first while operating as the sole general partner after co-founder Gur Talpaz and colleague Tayler Sipperly left in April to form a new firm called Cognition.
• Brightmind has made 14 investments to date with one exit, the SGNL acquisition.
• Early-stage cybersecurity startups raised $4.7 billion in seed-through-Series B deals through September, surpassing the total for all of 2025 despite a drop in deal count from 358 to 248.
• The average cybersecurity seed round increased to $8.4 million in the first nine months of this year from $5.54 million the prior year.
• Ward's team manually reviewed PitchBook data and found only 30 true AI security deals out of 278 deals bucketed as such in the first half of 2026.
• Brightmind's second fund will allocate about 20% to AI infrastructure deals and expects a significant number of teams from Israel, where roughly 40% of the debut fund's startups are based.
• The firm currently employs five people, including COO Iva Messy, principal Sven Wollschlaeger, CTO Jamie Mneimneh, and chief of staff Taylor Cleveland.
• Jamie Mneimneh built AI agents that source most of Brightmind's deal flow, allowing the firm to avoid hiring a bench of analysts and keep management fees down.
• Ward targets second-time founders who stick together and favors cyber-specific models that run locally for real-time protection.
• Ward aims to produce a 3x net fund return and does not plan to celebrate until that financial goal is achieved.