Ex-Secret Service Agent Stephen Ward Raises Second $250M Brightmind Fund

Stephen Ward, co-founder of the two-year-old New York cybersecurity fund Brightmind Partners, is raising a second fund of roughly $250 million — this time as sole general partner after co-founder Gur Talpaz left the firm in April.

Ward's debut fund, also $250 million and closed late last year with Talpaz, has already produced a mark: CrowdStrike agreed in January to buy identity security startup SGNL for $740 million, just 11 months after Brightmind led its Series A. The first fund has made 14 investments in total, with one exit.

Ward's exit discipline sets him apart from typical venture rhetoric. While most investors publicly promise IPOs, he says outright: "You have to sell on the way up." He claims the best cybersecurity sales come between a startup's third and seventh years, and warns founders when they are "going to race past the turn."

Who is Stephen Ward?

Ward's path to venture capital ran through the Coast Guard, nine years in the Secret Service, and CISO jobs at TIAA and Home Depot. After Seton Hall, where he graduated in 1998, he mailed roughly 300 resumes with no response until a professor — a chaplain to Secret Service, FBI and CIA personnel — introduced him around.

Stationed in New York, Ward arrested the hacker behind the largest credit card data theft of that era. He flipped the hacker into an informant and ran him for about three years — until the hacker kept committing crimes and, as a diversion, told the agency Ward was complicit. Ward spent roughly 18 months clearing his name. "It was hard to get out of bed," he said, describing the investigation as "almost like a spouse cheating on you." The hacker received a 20-year sentence; Audible turned the story into an eight-episode podcast, "Operation Firewall."

His corporate career followed: J.P. Morgan recruited him in 2007 to build a cybersecurity unit — "the dumbest person in the room," he says he felt, calling the bank the "best management school." Six years as CISO at TIAA followed, then two years at Home Depot starting in 2019. In 2021, burned out, he quit with nothing lined up for the first time since age 16.

The road to Brightmind

The founders of Wiz shortlisted Ward for a job. Jeff Horing of Insight Partners, which co-led Wiz's $100 million Series A in late 2020, interviewed him and offered him a role at Insight instead. The friend who took the Wiz job — Google bought Wiz last year for $32 billion — "made life-changing money," Ward says, but it doesn't bother him.

After three years at Insight, working on Wiz, Abnormal Security and Elisity (which IonQ agreed in October to buy for up to $1.3 billion), Ward struck out on his own at 49. Fewer than 20 LPs filled the first fund, including Horing. He started Brightmind in 2024 with Talpaz, a CrowdStrike corporate development executive.

What happened to the partnership?

Talpaz and early employee Tayler Sipperly left in April. Ward cited "differences in opinions regarding operations and the future of Brightmind." In August, the pair co-founded a new firm, Cognition, with CrowdStrike's global CTO of three years, Elia Zaitsev; it is reportedly targeting a $170 million first fund.

Ward's analytical edge is his map of buyers. His team tracks every security acquisition and what acquirers build versus buy. If CrowdStrike buys something, he says, "FOMO, then Zscaler is going to look over and go, 'What did they just do? I should probably do the same thing.'" Fit is binary, he argues: "It's very easy to go, 'Good match,' 'terrible match.'"

Why now?

The market is moving his way. Per PitchBook, early-stage cybersecurity startups are raising more than later-stage rivals for the first time in more than a decade: $4.7 billion across seed-through-Series B deals through September, ahead of all of 2025 despite deal count falling to 248 from 358. The average seed round jumped to $8.4 million in the first nine months of this year from $5.54 million a year earlier.

Ward is skeptical of the AI-security label. PitchBook bucketed 278 first-half deals as AI security; his team's manual review found only 30. He doubts Anthropic or OpenAI will "take over the security world" — they'll do "just enough."

The second fund will be about 20% AI infrastructure, with a meaningful share of teams expected from Israel; roughly 40% of the debut fund's startups are based in Tel Aviv. He favors "zero second" protection models running locally, citing Empirical Security, and targets aging incumbents like 27-year-old Qualys and 24-year-old Tenable.

Brightmind's five-person team includes COO Iva Messy (ex-Felicis and a16z), principal Sven Wollschlaeger, and CTO Jamie Mneimneh, who built an AWS test environment and AI agents that now source most deal flow — avoiding analyst overhead.

Ward, who grew up without money, frames the stakes plainly: he is paid to deliver a "3x net fund" and is "not going to celebrate until we get that." He targets second-time founders who stick together — though his solo second raise will test whether the formula survives without its co-founder.