Brightmind Partners Raises Second $250M Cybersecurity Fund

TL;DR

Brightmind Partners, a two-year-old New York cybersecurity venture firm, is raising a second fund targeting roughly the same size as its $251 million debut: around $250 million. The firm is doing it with a leaner team than it started with. Co-founder Gur Talpaz and early colleague Tayler Sipperly left in April 2026, leaving Stephen Ward, a former Secret Service agent and ex-CISO at TIAA and Home Depot, as Brightmind's sole General Partner. Fund I has made 14 investments and one exit so far: SGNL, the identity security startup CrowdStrike bought for $740 million in January 2026, eleven months after Brightmind led its Series A.

Key Takeaways

A same-size second fund, built around one GP. Ward is raising Fund II at roughly the same target as Fund I's $251 million, but without the co-founder he started the firm with. Talpaz and Sipperly's departure in April, followed by their move in August to co-found a new cybersecurity firm called Cognition alongside CrowdStrike's longtime global CTO Elia Zaitsev, makes this as much a story about Brightmind's team rebuilding around Ward as it is about the fund itself.

One real exit is doing a lot of the talking. SGNL's sale to CrowdStrike for $740 million came less than a year after Brightmind led its Series A, and it's the proof point Ward is pointing to as he goes back to LPs. Fund I's other 13 investments are still active, so the fund's full track record is still mostly unwritten.

The strategy is widening beyond pure cybersecurity. Ward says Fund II won't be entirely cybersecurity, with roughly 20% earmarked for AI infrastructure deals, and he expects a meaningful share of the portfolio to again come from Israel, where about 40% of Fund I's companies are based.

Ward's read on AI security hype is skeptical of the labeling, not the category. He pointed to PitchBook data showing 278 deals bucketed as AI security in the first half of 2026, against his own team's manual count of roughly 30 that actually fit. That distinction matters for a fund that's about to lean further into AI infrastructure itself.

Fund Overview

Fund Name: Brightmind Partners Fund II (unnamed/unconfirmed at this stage; Fund I is $251M)
Fund Size: Targeting roughly $250 million, in line with Fund I
Stage: Seed and Series A
Check Size: Not disclosed
Geography: U.S. and Israel-weighted, with roughly 40% of Fund I's portfolio based in Tel Aviv
Focus: Cybersecurity, with about 20% of Fund II earmarked for AI infrastructure
Key LPs: Not disclosed for Fund II; Fund I drew fewer than 20 LPs, including Jeff Horing of Insight Partners

Why This Fund Matters

Brightmind is raising into a cybersecurity funding market that looks unusual by recent historical standards. PitchBook counts $4.7 billion in seed-through-Series B cybersecurity deals through September 2026, already ahead of all of 2025's total despite the number of deals falling to 248 from 358 the year before. That's fewer, bigger rounds, and the average seed check has grown accordingly, from $5.54 million to $8.4 million year over year. For a fund built specifically around seed and Series A cybersecurity bets, that's a tailwind on round size but also a sign that competition for the best early deals has intensified.

Ward's own framing of the fund's edge is unusually concrete for an early-stage investor: he says his team manually reviews every security acquisition and tracks what the major buyers, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler among them, are building versus what they're likely to buy instead. That's an acquirer-behavior model built from his own career, split between running cybersecurity at J.P. Morgan, six years as CISO at TIAA, two years as CISO at Home Depot, and three years at Insight Partners working on Wiz, Abnormal Security and Elisity, the last of which IonQ agreed to buy for up to $1.3 billion in October 2026. SGNL's sale to CrowdStrike is the first time that framework has actually produced a Brightmind exit, which is why it's carrying so much of the fund's pitch right now.

The team disruption is real and worth weighing on its own terms. Talpaz, a former CrowdStrike corporate development executive, and Sipperly, also a CrowdStrike alum, left in the spring and resurfaced within months co-founding Cognition with Zaitsev, CrowdStrike's CTO for three years, reportedly targeting a $170 million first fund for cybersecurity startups. Ward has been direct that the split came down to disagreements over how the firm should operate and where it was headed, rather than describing it in more diplomatic terms. Brightmind is now built around four people besides Ward: COO Iva Messy, who came from Felicis and Andreessen Horowitz; principal Sven Wollschlaeger, who overlapped with Ward at Insight; CTO Jamie Mneimneh, who built the AI tooling that now sources most of the firm's deal flow; and chief of staff Taylor Cleveland.

The 20% AI infrastructure allocation in Fund II is the clearest strategic shift from Fund I. It puts Brightmind in more direct competition with generalist AI-focused funds for a slice of its capital, while keeping cybersecurity, where Ward's network and acquirer-behavior thesis are most differentiated, as the core. Whether that split holds up as AI infrastructure valuations keep climbing is one of the more interesting open questions in how this fund actually gets deployed.

The Team

Stephen Ward is Brightmind's Managing Partner and, since April 2026, its sole General Partner. His path into venture is unusual: four years in the Coast Guard, nine years in the Secret Service working financial crimes and cyber investigations, a stint building J.P. Morgan's cybersecurity unit, six years as CISO at TIAA, and two years as CISO at Home Depot, followed by three years at Insight Partners before he started Brightmind in 2024 with Talpaz. Sven Wollschlaeger is a Principal who spent three years alongside Ward at Insight. Iva Messy is Chief Operating Officer, having previously worked at Felicis and Andreessen Horowitz. Jamie Mneimneh is Chief Technology Officer and CISO, a role he's held since Ward first hired him as a distinguished engineer at Home Depot; he built the cloud testing environment the firm uses to evaluate startups' products and the AI agents that source most of its deal flow. Taylor Cleveland, Ward's former chief of staff at Home Depot, joined Brightmind earlier this year. Gur Talpaz, the firm's other co-founder, and Tayler Sipperly, its third employee, left in April 2026 and went on to co-found Cognition with Elia Zaitsev in August.

Early Portfolio

Brightmind's debut fund has made 14 investments. SGNL, a continuous identity security startup, was acquired by CrowdStrike and is the fund's only exit to date. The rest of the active portfolio spans a mix of stages and geographies: Empirical Security (Series A, Chicago, AI-driven vulnerability management), Aryon (Series A, Israel, cloud security at deployment), Act Security (Series A, Israel, cloud access security), Origin (Series A, New York, endpoint security), vijil (Series A, San Francisco, AI agent trust infrastructure), Abundant Security (seed, autonomous remediation), Dawn (seed, New York, access intelligence), QueryStory (seed, San Francisco, data access for decisions), Artemis (seed, New York, AI-native SIEM), Pi Security (seed, San Francisco, AI-native application security and governance), Onit (seed, Israel, exposure management), and Rig Security (seed, Tel Aviv, AI identity control), along with an undisclosed seed-stage company in Israel. Brightmind has co-invested alongside firms including Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, Felicis, Bessemer Venture Partners, Mayfield, Cisco Investments and Datadog Ventures, among others.

What This Means for Founders

Seed and Series A cybersecurity founders, particularly second-time founders working with a co-founder they've stuck with through a prior company, are the clearest fit here. Ward has been specific that this is the founder profile he's most comfortable backing, and his acquirer-mapping approach means pitches that clearly show how a product fits, or doesn't fit, into what the likely strategic buyers are already building tend to land better than a generic "we could get acquired by anyone" pitch.

Founders building at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity should go in with real numbers, not AI-security branding. Given Ward's team's manual re-categorization of PitchBook's AI security deal count down from 278 to roughly 30, a startup that leans on the AI-security label without a technical story that would survive that kind of scrutiny is likely to get pushed on exactly that point.

Fund Momentum Take

The most interesting thing about this raise isn't the dollar figure, it's that Ward is doing it solo after losing both of his original partners within the same year. Founders built Brightmind's first fund on a three-person team with real CrowdStrike relationships baked in through Talpaz and Sipperly; that network effect doesn't disappear overnight, but it's no longer sitting inside Brightmind, it's sitting inside a competing firm built by the same people. Ward's bet is that his own acquirer-behavior framework and his individual LP relationships, including Jeff Horing's, are durable enough to carry a second fund of similar size without that original pairing.

SGNL's exit is a genuinely strong data point, but it's one data point against 13 other still-unrealized bets, and Brightmind will be pitching Fund II LPs largely on the strength of that single win plus Ward's framework rather than a broad, proven track record across the portfolio. That's a normal position for a two-year-old firm to be in, not a red flag on its own, but it does mean the real test of whether this model works comes from the next few exits, not this one.

The 20% AI infrastructure carve-out is worth watching closely. It's a reasonable hedge against cybersecurity-specific headwinds, and it plays to real demand, but it also means a chunk of Fund II will be judged by different competitive dynamics than the cybersecurity-acquirer framework that's been Ward's actual edge. If that allocation grows past 20% in practice, it's worth asking whether Brightmind is still the cybersecurity specialist its first fund was built to be.

Frequently Asked Questions

How big is Brightmind Partners' new fund?
Stephen Ward is targeting roughly the same size as Fund I, which closed at $251 million. An exact target or close date for Fund II hasn't been disclosed.

Who runs Brightmind Partners now?
Stephen Ward is the sole General Partner and Managing Partner. Co-founder Gur Talpaz and early colleague Tayler Sipperly left in April 2026.

What happened to Brightmind's co-founder?
Gur Talpaz left in April 2026 and, in August, co-founded a new cybersecurity venture firm called Cognition alongside Elia Zaitsev, CrowdStrike's former global CTO, reportedly targeting a $170 million debut fund.

What has Brightmind's first fund invested in?
Fourteen companies, including SGNL, which CrowdStrike acquired for $740 million in January 2026, Brightmind's only exit to date. Other portfolio companies include Empirical Security, Aryon, Act Security, Origin, vijil, Artemis, Onit and Rig Security.

What's new in the fund's strategy?
Fund II won't be entirely cybersecurity. Ward says about 20% will go to AI infrastructure deals, while the firm continues to expect a meaningful share of its portfolio to come from Israel.

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