Exclusive: Cyber specialist Method Security raises $26 million
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Method Security, a dual-use company combining cyber expertise with artificial intelligence speed, raised $26 million across its seed round and Series A.
Why it matters: Much national-security energy today is paid to drone-and-missile stockpiles, shipbuilding and the like. But digital breaches — something like China's Volt Typhoon, which jeopardized critical infrastructure — could upend it all.
- "Cyber conflict is perpetual, it's always on across all sides and it does not discriminate between public and private targets," CEO Sam Jones told Axios.
- "Our view is that the future of cyber conflict will be decided by who can harness autonomy safely at scale."
Context: Method offers offensive and defensive tools to users. That includes autonomously mapping attack paths and executing red-team tests.
Follow the money: Andreessen Horowitz led the seed; General Catalyst led the Series A. The company's other backers include Blackstone Innovations Investments, Crossbeam Venture Partners, Forward Deployed Venture Capital and Pax Ventures.
- "Cyber conflict is moving to machine speed, with state actors now weaponizing AI at scale. We can't regulate our way to victory — U.S. cyber operators need new autonomous systems to win the fight," David Ulevitch, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told Axios.
- "Method has the team, the approach and the platform to deliver that advantage."
- Ulevitch founded OpenDNS, a cloud-delivered security service sold to Cisco in 2015 for $635 million.
Zoom in: Method's earliest customers included Blackstone as well as a Defense Department organization. The company — staffed by AWS, CrowdStrike and Palantir Technologies alumni, among others — now has "a number" of Pentagon deals under its belt, according to Jones.
The bottom line: "America has a cyber resilience problem," Jones said, "and that is the problem we're focused on here at Method."
Go deeper: Chinese hackers used Anthropic's AI agent to automate spying
