Brightmind Partners, a New York cybersecurity investment firm about two years old, is raising a second fund of roughly $250 million, about the same size as its first, according to TechCrunch, which reported on November 5, 2026. Stephen Ward, a co-founder whose background includes four years in the Coast Guard, nine years in the Secret Service and CISO roles at TIAA and Home Depot, is now its sole general partner.

The new fund

  • About 20% of it is expected to target AI infrastructure, and Ward expects a meaningful number of Israeli teams.
  • Ward became sole general partner after co-founder Gur Talpaz and another early colleague left in April. Ward cited “differences in opinions regarding operations and the future of Brightmind.”

The first fund

  • It closed late last year at $250 million with Talpaz, and has made 14 investments and one exit so far: SGNL, an identity security startup that CrowdStrike agreed to buy for $740 million in January. Brightmind led SGNL’s Series A about 11 months earlier.
  • About 40% of its startups are based in Tel Aviv, and fewer than 20 limited partners filled the fund, including Insight’s Jeff Horing.

Investment views Ward described

  • “You have to sell on the way up”: the firm prefers selling during growth rather than waiting for an IPO, and says the best cybersecurity exits typically come between a startup’s third and seventh years.
  • He is skeptical that AI labs will dominate security, doubting Anthropic or OpenAI will “take over the security world.” PitchBook counted 278 AI security deals in the first half of 2026, but Brightmind’s manual review found only 30 true ones, per Ward.
  • He favors real-time protection using cyber-specific models that run locally on customer systems, citing Empirical Security as an example, and sees established public companies such as Qualys and Tenable as potentially vulnerable.
  • He prefers second-time founders who stick together, and said he is paid to produce a “3x net fund” and is “not going to celebrate until we get that.”

Market context from PitchBook

TechCrunch says early-stage cybersecurity startups have outraised later-stage rivals for the first time in over a decade. Seed-through-Series B deals totaled $4.7 billion through September, while deal count fell to 248 from 358, and the average seed round rose to $8.4 million from $5.54 million.

Sources and notes

This post is based on TechCrunch’s profile by Connie Loizos (10:00 a.m. PST, November 5, 2026). The fund size is described as roughly $250 million and Brightmind has not closed it, as far as the article says. The article carries an update added after publication that Lens has not reproduced, and Lens did not contact Brightmind or read the PitchBook data.

Image: wooden chess pieces on a chessboard, by Aaaatu via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; cropped. Stand-in photo; it is not related to Brightmind and does not show the events described.