He arrested a hacker, then spent 18 months clearing his own name. Now he’s a cybersecurity VC.

Stephen Ward, co-founder of Brightmind Partners, a two-year-old cybersecurity fund in New York, is raising a second fund targeting roughly the same size as his debut vehicle, a $250 million fund that closed late last year with co-founder Gur Talpaz. Ward will pursue the raise alone after Talpaz left in April along with colleague Tayler Sipperly, leaving Ward as the firm's sole general partner.

Ward's track record includes a 20-year career in government and corporate security before entering venture capital. He spent four years in the Coast Guard in search and rescue, then nine years with the Secret Service investigating financial crimes and cybersecurity. During his Secret Service tenure, he arrested a hacker involved in the largest credit card data theft of that era, then flipped him as an informant. When the hacker was caught hacking again, he falsely accused Ward of involvement, forcing Ward to spend roughly 18 months clearing his name.

He later held CISO positions at TIAA for six years and Home Depot for two years starting in 2019. In 2021, he joined Insight Partners as a venture capitalist, where he worked on investments including Wiz, Abnormal Security, and Elisity. At age 49, he left Insight to start Brightmind.

Brightmind's debut fund has made 14 investments with one exit so far: SGNL, an identity security startup that CrowdStrike agreed to buy in January for $740 million, 11 months after Brightmind led its Series A.

Ward emphasizes a pragmatic approach to exits, saying founders must "sell on the way up" rather than chase IPOs. He tracks how major security buyers like Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler acquire startups to time exit windows. He notes that the best security sales happen between a startup's third and seventh years.

Talpaz and Sipperly co-founded a new venture firm called Cognition in August with Elia Zaitsev, CrowdStrike's global CTO. Cognition is reportedly targeting a $170 million first fund. Talpaz and Sipperly say they "continue to support the existing Brightmind portfolio companies as well as its limited partners" and remain on boards of several Brightmind companies.

Early-stage cybersecurity startups are raising more money than later-stage rivals for the first time in more than a decade, with $4.7 billion in seed-through-Series B deals through September, according to PitchBook.