By Maggie Gray
Cyberspace has become a decisive domain of warfare, where speed, scale, and software increasingly determine outcomes. Cyber capabilities played a major role in U.S. operations in Iran and Venezuela. At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence are accelerating cyber operations. In late 2025, Anthropic announced the detection and disruption of the first-ever reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign in which a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group used AI agents to target roughly thirty organizations globally, successfully penetrating several of them.
We know that our adversaries are using AI to conduct offensive cyber operations. U.S. cyber operators must now move at the same machine speed, adopting AI-enabled tools and workflows to match the scale, speed, and autonomy that adversaries are already demonstrating in real-world attacks.
Autonomous Cyber is building the American cyber neo-prime to ensure U.S. forces have the tools they need to remain competitive in the fifth domain.
As CEO Patrick O'Brien puts it, everyone in information security saw LLMs and immediately recognized their potential: “these are hack bots.” The teams that learn to use AI effectively will outperform those that do not. AI is fundamentally changing how offensive cyber operations are conducted, and legacy U.S. offensive cyber firms cannot keep up.
At its core, the company is developing FUZZ-E, an AI-native platform that supports the full cyber kill chain, from finding and weaponizing vulnerabilities to generating and executing exploits. In practice, this means compressing tasks that once took days into minutes, while allowing operators to focus on higher-level decision-making. Rather than replacing humans, the platform augments them, enabling junior analysts to perform at a higher level and experienced operators to scale their impact across more targets. The U.S. Air Force awarded Autonomous Cyber a Tactical Funding Increase (TACFI) to deliver FUZZ-E to the 16th Air Force (AFCYBER) to accelerate CYBERCOM operations.
Autonomous Cyber truly has the team to revolutionize how wars are fought in the fifth domain. CEO Patrick O'Brien brings experience from the National Security Agency, while co-founder and COO Bohdan Volyanyuk brings an operational perspective from the U.S. Army. They are building from firsthand knowledge of how cyber operations actually work – and where they break.
Shield Capital is proud to lead the Seed round into Autonomous Cyber. Our investment reflects our conviction that the future of cyber operations will be defined by AI-native platforms that augment human operators, scale expertise, and enable the United States and its allies to compete – and win – at machine speed in the fifth domain. Mission Matters.