Well, the guys over at Twenty are having quite the summer.
Yesterday, just about a month after announcing their $100M Series B, the offensive cyber warfare startup announced that it’s raised yet another $30M (a Series B extension) from Khosla Ventures at a $1.2B valuation.
- That Series B in June was raised at $1B valuation.
- Accel led the OG Series B—other investors included Point72 Ventures, Friends & Family Capital, and Caffeinated Capital.
Founder and CEO Joe Lin told Tectonic that they’d actually closed the Series B and “told the rest of the company [that] we’re going to be heads down back to work.” But then Khosla hit them up.
“With someone like Jon Chu and Vinod Khosla, when they come knocking, you don’t say no,” Lin told Tectonic. “They’d been watching the category, offensive cyber, for quite some time, and they believed they had the same thesis that we did, which is that we have to be able to industrialize cyber warfare, just like we’ve industrialized warfare in every other domain.”
“They believe that it is…one of the few domains of warfare that had been massively underinvested in by Silicon Valley for quite some time,” he added.
The $30M tack-on brings total funding to $168B. Lin says they’ll use the money to invest massively in R&D and scale up in DC and New York—fast.
Everything is computer: We actually don’t spend too much time talking about cyber around here—we tend to get distracted by the stuff that goes zoom and boom. But cyber—as demonstrated by things like the capture of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela and the ongoing war with Iran—is an increasingly important part of modern warfare.
“We believe that the future of modern war is going to be decided in no small part by who is able to control the information domain,” Lin said. “Then the natural extension of that is whoever controls the cyber domain, whoever has dominance in the cyber domain, will be able to dictate whether wars are won or lost.”
That’s why he and a team of “decorated veterans and elite operators” founded Twenty back in 2024. They officially came out of stealth (with a $38M Series A led by Caffeinated Capital) last fall.
- The idea is that they want to “industrialize” cyber warfare. That means building end-to-end solutions that are scalable and usable by even untrained frontline operators, rather than complicated and bespoke tactics.
- So, what’s that actually made up of? Think AI agents and systems that can not only identify vulnerabilities in an adversary’s network, but carry out offensive attacks.
- While Lin was fairly coy on who they’re working with and how much they’ve won in contracts, he did say they “work extensively across the entire U.S. military and intelligence community [and] that [their] capabilities are in operational deployment.”
“What we’re really trying to do is we’re looking at this entire operations lifecycle, [which] is extraordinarily complex [and] very fast moving, and we’re trying to find ways to take this life cycle, where going through it once can currently take months, sometimes weeks, and we’re trying to compress it down into…machine speed operations,” Lin explained.
Look it up: A lot of this new cash money (like, most of the $130M Series B) will go towards R&D.
“We have to plow literally all of it into research and development…which is something that the offensive cyber domain has largely been starved of for a very long time,” Lin said. “On the offensive side, there hasn’t been the same degree of resources…and so this is part of the reason why so much of how we conduct offensive cyber operations and cyber warfare today remains bespoke.”
Plus, they’re going to massively expand their DC HQ and open a new New York office—after all, not all great cyber operators and engineers live in the 202.
Across the aisle: Lin sees cyber as one of the rare issues that gets pretty mega bipartisan backing—and that’s a big part of why he thinks they’ve had such insane velocity.
“You do have a White House that is calling for increased offensive cyber capabilities and increased offensive cyber operations in order to be able to impose greater costs on our adversaries,” he said. “The other thing to note, though, is that the need for greater offensive cyber capabilities really has strong bipartisan support throughout government, especially on the legislative side.”
“The future of warfare [is] going to be led by cyber operations, and we’ve seen this in just the last year, beginning with Operation Midnight Hammer, and then Venezuela, and then, again, with Epic Fury,” Lin added. “We have to have capabilities in our arsenal that are capable of operating at the speed and tempo that the warfighters require.”