Ballistic Ventures

Ballistic Ventures is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm dedicated exclusively to cybersecurity, founded in late 2021 by a founding partnership of accomplished cybersecurity operators: Kevin Mandia, founder and former CEO of Mandiant, one of the most consequential cybersecurity companies in history; Barmak Meftah, former CEO of AlienVault and AT&T Cybersecurity; Ted Schlein, who spent three decades as a general partner at Kleiner Perkins focused on security and has backed companies that fundamentally shaped the cybersecurity landscape; Jake Seid; and Roger Thornton, co-founder of Fortify Software and AlienVault. The firm closed its inaugural $300 million Fund I in May 2022 and followed with an oversubscribed $360 million Fund II in 2024, bringing total assets under management to approximately $660 million, with a third fund reportedly in formation as of 2025. Ballistic functions as a hands-on co-founder as much as a financial investor: the team actively co-founds companies alongside world-class technologists, takes board seats, and helps portfolio companies with hiring, product strategy, and securing their first ten enterprise customers. The firm's national security credentials are significant, with Ted Schlein serving on the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee and advising the US intelligence community, and Kevin Mandia having built Mandiant into the leading incident response and threat intelligence firm before its acquisition by FireEye and subsequently Google. Portfolio companies include Cyera, a cloud data security company, Dope Security, a modern secure web gateway, Mitiga, a cloud threat detection and response platform, Nudge Security, an identity and SaaS security company, Alethea, an AI-driven disinformation detection platform, and ArmorCode, an application security posture management platform.