Ocean launches from stealth with $28M to protect enterprises from AI-powered email attacks

Why it matters

AI is making phishing cheaper and more convincing. If agentic email security works as promised, teams could automate more of the grind and catch attacks that slip past legacy filters.

Ocean, an agentic email security startup built to counter AI-powered phishing, launched from stealth with $28 million in total funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners, the company said in its launch announcement and CEO Shay Shwartz's post. Angel investors include Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport; Armis co-founders Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael; and Dor Knafo, former CEO of Axis Security and now a general partner at Cyberstarts.

Ocean positions its platform as AI-native email security built on autonomous investigation before a compromise, not after. At the core is Ray, Ocean's central intelligence engine that, according to the company, coordinates a swarm of purpose-built agents to understand intent, enrich context, follow the evidence, and produce explainable verdicts with the full reasoning and signals behind each decision.

The company argues that as generative AI makes spear phishing easy to generate, deeply personalized, and infinitely scalable, anomaly- and pattern-based detection breaks down. Ocean says its agents investigate every email like a seasoned analyst, verify signals against real business context, and automate triage and response across SOC workflows, including auto-handling reported phishing and quarantine release requests in seconds, while guiding employees in the inbox in real time. The system is powered by SLMs and LLMs built specifically for email security, per Ocean.

On traction, Ocean says it protects hundreds of thousands of employee mailboxes, has scanned over 1 billion emails within its first year, and now processes more than 1 billion emails every month. The company says it secures complex enterprise environments across sectors; logos on its site highlight Kingston, Fresenius, Simpson Strong-Tie, Black Rifle Coffee Company, Prime Healthcare, Energix, Headspace, Guesty, and Scytale.

Founder background is central to the bet. TechCrunch profiled CEO and co-founder Shay Shwartz's path from teen hacker to national-defense researcher, reporting that after getting caught at 16 he shifted to defense, spent roughly a decade in elite Israeli units on projects linked to Iron Dome, and later joined Axis Security, acquired by HPE (TechCrunch). Ocean was founded in 2024 by Shwartz and co-founder Oran Moyal and is headquartered in New York City and Tel Aviv, the company said.

Lightspeed's David Gussarsky characterized email security as hitting an inflection point as AI raises the realism and scale of attacks, while Island co-founder and CEO Mike Fey argued Ocean's offensive-rooted team and focus on intent and context align with what is required to solve the problem, per the company’s announcement.

Ocean plans to use the new capital to deepen investment in AI research and development, expand its AI-native infrastructure, and continue building a platform where product and operations are powered by AI agents.

Context from the investor roster matters too. TechCrunch noted that Armis recently sold to ServiceNow for $7.75 billion, a signal that experienced operators in cloud-era security see room for new winners. The test for Ocean now is converting its agentic thesis into fewer successful phishing attempts across the inboxes it already touches.