Ex-Defense Engineer’s Startup Raises $28 Million To Counter AI-Driven Email Scams

Two-year-old company Ocean announced Monday that it has come out of stealth with 28 million dollars in fresh capital to tackle what its founder calls a surge in AI-enabled phishing. The email-security outfit says its platform inspects context around each message and is already reviewing several billion messages a month for corporate customers including Kayak, Kingston Technology and Headspace.

The financing was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and included Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. Angel backers named by the company include Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz, plus Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, founders of Armis, which sold to ServiceNow for roughly 7 3/4 billion dollars.

Ocean’s founder, Shay Shwartz, traces his technical career back to his teens, when he admits he wrote offensive code and earned money from hacking before authorities stopped him at age 16. He redirected that ability into defensive work, spending about 10 years on high-profile cybersecurity programs for Israeli defense and intelligence units, with some projects tied to the Iron Dome effort. He later joined Axis, a security company that was acquired by HPE, and after a long-running interest in entrepreneurship launched Ocean two years ago.

The product centers on a compact language model the company designed to rapidly parse inbound email, infer sender intent and weigh that against the specifics of an organization’s structure and relationships. Ocean calls this an agentic approach to detection, and executives say it helps flag impersonation and targeted fraud that conventional filters miss. The startup declined to provide raw metrics for detection rates, but confirmed its platform runs at-scale across enterprise mailflows.

Industry observers say the threat picture has shifted because generative models cut the time and expertise needed to craft convincing, tailored scams. “What used to take days of manual reconnaissance can now be produced in minutes, so defenders face far higher volumes of credible-looking messages,” said a cybersecurity researcher who reviewed Ocean’s materials. Established vendors still block many common phishing attempts, but several firms in the market are racing to adapt defenses to automated, personalized campaigns.

Ocean plans to use the new funding to expand engineering, beef up product integrations and grow sales. Company leadership acknowledges challenges ahead — from limiting false positives to handling sensitive customer data — but says its aim is to lift baseline inbox hygiene so organizations can operate with fewer successful impersonation incidents.