Former Secret Service agent Steven Ward is raising Brightmind's second cybersecurity fund at $250 million

A second fund and a departed partner

Steven Ward, co-founder of the New York-based fund Brightmind Partners, is raising a second fund of roughly the same size as the first — $250 million. Ward himself disclosed this in an interview with TechCrunch. Two years ago he closed his debut fund together with co-founder Gur Talpaz, but now he will be raising money on his own: Talpaz left the firm in April along with another early employee, and Ward remained the sole general partner. He framed the reason for the departure cautiously, citing 'differences of opinion regarding operations and the future of Brightmind.' In August, Talpaz and Tyler Cipperley — a third Brightmind employee — founded a new venture firm, Cognition, together with CrowdStrike's global CTO Elia Zaitsev; according to reports, it is targeting a debut fund of $170 million to invest in cybersecurity startups.

A résumé featuring the Secret Service and a scandal

Ward's path into venture capital was unconventional. After four years in the Coast Guard's search-and-rescue service and studies at Seton Hall, he served nine years in the Secret Service, where, following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, he moved into cyber investigations. While in New York, he arrested a hacker responsible for the largest credit card data theft of that era, but instead of pressing charges he recruited him as an informant and ran him for about three years. The hacker kept hacking, was caught again, and as a diversion claimed to the agency that Ward was his accomplice. Ward, who had already moved to the private sector, needed about 18 months to clear his name; the hacker himself was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and the story became the basis of the eight-episode Audible podcast 'Operation Firewall'. Next came J.P. Morgan, which lured him away in 2007 to build a cybersecurity unit, six years as CISO at TIAA, and two years at Home Depot starting in 2019. In 2021, burned out, he resigned, and through the founders of Wiz received an offer from Insight Partners, where he spent three years working on deals involving Wiz, Abnormal Security, and Elisity — the latter IonQ agreed to acquire in October for up to $1.3 billion.

Betting on early exits

Brightmind's first fund made 14 investments with one exit: the identity security startup SGNL, whose Series A Brightmind led, CrowdStrike agreed to acquire in January for $740 million — 11 months after the round. Some investors asked why the fund had not held its position longer, but Ward takes a pragmatic approach: 'You need to sell on the way up.' According to him, the best exits in cybersecurity come between a startup's third and seventh year of life, and his team tracks every acquisition in the industry and what buyers are building themselves versus buying: if a product duplicates CrowdStrike's in-house development, a deal is unlikely, while a Palo Alto Networks acquisition could trigger 'FOMO' at Zscaler.

The market is on his side — with caveats

The timing, as TechCrunch notes, is favorable: according to PitchBook, early-stage cybersecurity startups are attracting more funding than late-stage companies for the first time in more than a decade — $4.7 billion across deals from seed to Series B over nine months, which already exceeds all of 2025, even though the number of deals fell from 358 to 248. The average seed round grew to $8.4 million from $5.54 million a year earlier. Ward is nonetheless skeptical of deals being labeled 'AI security': of the 278 deals in the first half of 2026 that PitchBook classified in this category, his team's manual review found only 30 to be genuine. He does not expect Anthropic or OpenAI to 'take over the world of security,' and prefers specialized models that run locally at the customer's site — as at Empirical Security. The second fund will not be entirely cybersecurity-focused: about 20% will go to AI infrastructure, and Ward expects a significant share of the teams to come from Israel — roughly 40% of the first fund's startups are based in Tel Aviv. Among his targets, he names what he sees as vulnerable market veterans — the 27-year-old Qualys and the 24-year-old Tenable.