Brightmind Partners, a two-year-old cybersecurity venture fund based in New York, is raising a second fund that its co-founder Stephen Ward says will be roughly the same size as the firm’s $250 million debut. The effort is taking place with Ward as the sole general partner, after co-founder Gur Talpaz left the firm earlier this year.
Ward takes a blunt view of exits. Brightmind Partners, he said, expects its portfolio companies to sell before they go public, and he put it plainly: “You have to sell on the way up.” Most venture investors avoid saying that in public, even though they model several exit paths every time they write a check.
A debut fund and an early exit
Brightmind Partners closed its debut fund late last year at $250 million. Ward and Talpaz raised the fund together. The firm’s first major result came when CrowdStrike agreed in January to buy SGNL, an identity security startup, for $740 million. Brightmind Partners had led SGNL’s Series A round 11 months before that deal was announced.
The first fund has made 14 investments so far, with SGNL as its only exit. Some investors asked why Brightmind Partners did not hold that position longer. Ward said he has seen enough deals to recognize when a founder is about to “race past the turn,” and he said he is willing to push founders toward a sale at the right time.
From the Coast Guard to the Secret Service
Ward grew up in northwest New Jersey between two farms. His family could not afford college for his older brothers. After high school he joined the Coast Guard, inspired by a commercial showing a man jumping out of a helicopter, although he said he barely knew how to swim at the time. He spent four years in search and rescue.
After studying criminal justice at Seton Hall University, he graduated in 1998 and sent out about 300 résumés without a reply. A Seton Hall professor who served as a chaplain to Secret Service personnel, along with members of the FBI and CIA, introduced him to people in the field, and the Secret Service called first. Ward spent nine years with the agency. He moved from financial crime investigations into cyber work after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Ward said the Secret Service years shaped him more than anything that came after. He has described the agency as the place where he learned to investigate, and it is also where his later career began to take a sharp turn.
An arrest, an informant and an 18-month fight to clear his name
While stationed in New York, Ward arrested a hacker who had carried out what was then the largest credit card data theft of its era. Instead of charging him, Ward turned the hacker into an informant and ran him for about three years. The hacker kept committing crimes, and after he was caught again he told the agency, as a diversion, that Ward had been involved.
Ward had already left for the private sector by then. He spent roughly 18 months clearing his name. He described that period as hard to get through, and compared the investigation to being cheated on by a spouse, given how much he loved the agency. The hacker received a 20-year sentence. Audible later bought the rights to the story and turned it into an eight-episode podcast called “Operation Firewall.”
Corporate jobs that shaped his investing approach
Ward’s first private-sector job was at J.P. Morgan, where he was recruited in 2007 to build a cybersecurity unit. He has called it the hardest transition of his career and said he felt like “the dumbest person in the room.” He stayed, and now describes the investment bank as the “best management school.” He then spent six years as CISO at the financial services company TIAA, followed by two years at Home Depot starting in 2019.
He left Home Depot in 2021 without another job lined up, the first time he had done that since he was 16. Jeff Horing, a venture capitalist at Insight Partners, interviewed him for a role after the founders of Wiz had considered him for a job at their company. Horing offered him a position at Insight instead. Google acquired Wiz last year for $32 billion. Ward spent three years at Insight, where he said he worked on Wiz, Abnormal Security and Elisity, which IonQ agreed in October to buy for up to $1.3 billion.
At age 49 he decided to start his own fund. He said people told him venture investing was a young person’s game. He cold-emailed limited partners, and fewer than 20 LPs eventually filled the fund, including Horing.
Brightmind Partners after the founder split
Ward launched Brightmind Partners in 2024 with Talpaz, a CrowdStrike corporate development executive whose deals overlapped with Ward’s time at Insight. Tayler Sipperly, another CrowdStrike corporate development alumnus, joined as the firm’s third employee. The partnership ended this past spring. Asked what happened, Ward cited “differences in opinions regarding operations and the future of Brightmind.”
Talpaz and Sipperly later co-founded a new venture firm, Cognition, with Elia Zaitsev, CrowdStrike’s global CTO for the past three years. Cognition is reportedly targeting a $170 million first fund to back cybersecurity startups. Sipperly said that he and Talpaz “continue to support the existing Brightmind portfolio companies as well as its limited partners” and that they “remain on the board of a number of the Brightmind portfolio companies.” That statement was added after the original publication.
Market conditions and where the second fund is headed
Early-stage cybersecurity startups are raising more money than later-stage rivals for the first time in more than a decade, according to PitchBook. The data firm counts $4.7 billion in seed through Series B deals through September. That total already exceeds all of 2025, even though the number of deals fell to 248 from 358 last year. The average cybersecurity seed round rose to $8.4 million in the first nine months of this year, up from $5.54 million a year earlier.
Ward is skeptical about how much of that money goes to AI security. PitchBook counted 278 deals in the first half of 2026 as AI security, but Brightmind Partners’ manual review found only 30 true ones. He does not expect Anthropic or OpenAI to “take over the security world,” and he thinks they will do “just enough.” For real-time protection, which he calls “zero second,” he favors cyber-specific models that run locally on a customer’s systems, such as those from Empirical Security.
The second fund will not be entirely cybersecurity. Ward said about 20% will go to AI infrastructure deals, and he expects a meaningful number of teams to come from Israel. About 40% of the debut fund’s startups are based in Tel Aviv. Asked which founders he most wants to back, he answered immediately: second-time founders who stick together.
The Brightmind Partners team
Brightmind Partners has five people. COO Iva Messy, also a Seton Hall graduate, came from Felicis and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Sven Wollschlaeger spent three years with Ward at Insight and is a principal at the firm. CTO Jamie Mneimneh, whom Ward first hired at Home Depot, built the AWS cloud environment where the firm tests startup products. Mneimneh also built the AI agents that source most of Brightmind Partners’ deal flow, which Ward said lets the firm avoid hiring a bench of analysts and keeps management fees down. Taylor Cleveland, Ward’s former chief of staff at Home Depot, joined a few months ago.
Ward says his main motivation has not changed. He grew up without money and still worries about it. He said Brightmind Partners is aiming for a “3x net fund” and that he is “not going to celebrate until we get that.”