Stephen Ward, a former U.S. Secret Service agent and three-time chief information security officer, is raising a second $250 million fund for his cybersecurity venture firm Brightmind Partners. Ward is now the fund’s sole general partner after co-founder Gur Talpaz departed in April 2026, he told TechCrunch in an on-record interview.
Brightmind’s debut fund closed in late 2025 with roughly 14 investments, including a lead role in identity security startup SGNL’s Series A round in February 2025. CrowdStrike agreed to acquire SGNL for $740 million in January 2026, Brightmind’s only exit so far from that fund.
Talpaz left Brightmind in April 2026 along with another early colleague, Taylor Sipperly. Ward described the split as stemming from “differences in opinions regarding operations and the future of Brightmind.” Talpaz and Sipperly later co-founded a separate firm, Cognition, alongside CrowdStrike chief technology officer Elia Zaitsev. Cognition is reportedly targeting a $170 million first fund, TechCrunch reported, without independent confirmation of the figure.
Brightmind now runs with five people, including chief operating officer Iva Messy, chief technology officer Jamie Mneimneh and principal Sven Wollschlaeger, alongside Ward as its only general partner.
What is the new fund targeting?
Roughly 20% of the second fund will go toward AI infrastructure investments, Ward said, and he expects a meaningful share of portfolio teams to come from Israel, continuing a pattern from the first fund, where about 40% of investments were in Tel Aviv-based startups.
Ward is wary of over-labeling the category. Industry-wide, PitchBook counted 278 deals in the first half of 2026 for startups describing themselves as AI security companies, but Brightmind’s own manual review found only 30 it considered genuinely AI-native security businesses, Ward said.
Why cybersecurity funding is shifting earlier
Early-stage cybersecurity startups raised more capital than later-stage rivals for the first time in over a decade this year, according to PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch. Deal count fell, but checks got bigger.
| Metric (seed through Series B) | 2025 | 2026 (through September) |
|---|---|---|
| Deal count | 358 | 248 |
| Average seed round size | $5.54 million | $8.4 million |
| Total seed-to-Series-B capital | not disclosed | $4.7 billion |
PitchBook’s figures cover seed through Series B rounds specifically; the same breakdown did not detail later-stage cybersecurity financing trends, per TechCrunch’s report.
What track record is Brightmind pointing to?
Fewer than 20 limited partners backed Brightmind’s debut fund, including Jeff Horing of Insight Partners, where Ward worked for three years before starting Brightmind. At Insight, Ward was involved in two of the cybersecurity sector’s largest recent deals: Google’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz, and IonQ’s agreement in October to buy Elisity for up to $1.3 billion.
Ward said he is being judged on delivering a fund that returns three times its capital, and does not plan to celebrate until that happens. The new fund’s target size, about $250 million, matches the debut fund rather than scaling up after SGNL’s exit.
Who is Stephen Ward?
Ward grew up in northwest New Jersey and joined the Coast Guard out of high school, spending four years in search-and-rescue work. He graduated from Seton Hall University in 1998 with a criminal justice degree, and a professor’s introduction led him into the Secret Service, where he spent nine years, moving into cyber investigations after the September 11 attacks.
As an agent in New York, he arrested a hacker connected to a large credit card data theft and flipped him into an informant for about three years. The hacker later accused Ward of involvement in his crimes; Ward spent roughly 18 months clearing his name, and the hacker was sentenced to 20 years. Audible turned the case into an eight-episode podcast, Operation Firewall.
Ward went on to build a cybersecurity unit at J.P. Morgan, a role he has called his best management training, then spent six years as chief information security officer at TIAA and, from 2019, at Home Depot. He left Home Depot in 2021 with no job lined up, joined Insight Partners for three years, and started Brightmind in 2024 at age 49.
Brightmind has not announced a formal close date for the second fund. Whether its AI-infrastructure allocation and Israel-heavy sourcing hold through the raise, and whether Talpaz and Sipperly’s new firm Cognition closes its own fund, are both worth watching in the cybersecurity venture market over the coming months. Brightmind’s current team of five has not changed since Talpaz and Sipperly’s departure in April.
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