AegisAI raises $36M to defend email from AI-powered phishing attacks

Email has become the primary vector for AI-driven attacks. Hackers now leverage AI to quickly aggregate personal information—details about coworkers, active projects, and recent travel—to craft highly convincing, personalized messages. Last year, Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, both former Google security executives who had worked on Gmail's safe browsing technology and reCAPTCHA, founded AegisAI to address this emerging threat. They recognized that existing rule-based email security systems, which rely on rigid if-then logic, are too slow and limited to catch AI-generated malicious emails.

AegisAI's solution deploys AI agents that analyze each incoming message the way a human analyst would, identifying subtle anomalies and inconsistencies that even comprehensive checklists would miss. Khormaee told TechCrunch that AI-powered attacks now bypass existing controls more than half the time, making them almost twice as effective as traditional phishing. He noted that attackers "researched you, they understand everything about you, and they're targeting attacks that are perfectly bespoke to you." The startup's agents can also detect sophisticated threats like malicious PDF attachments with embedded passwords and CAPTCHAs, which are often designed to fool standard spam filters.

In less than a year, AegisAI has been adopted by dozens of customers, including Mash (a crypto payments company), LangChain (an AI startup), and Lokker (a Google-owned privacy compliance platform). This traction culminated in a $36 million（約58億円） Series A funding round led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing backers Accel and Foundation Capital, bringing the startup's total capital to $49 million（約78億円）. Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures, explained that he saw an increase in email attacks and wanted to back a company that could "defend against AI with AI, one aiming to replace legacy email security tools with agentic-driven defense." He emphasized that "the bad guys are using email to attack us using AI at a much faster pace than we can keep up with," and that defending against this threat will be "a number one priority for a lot of companies."

AegisAI is not the only startup pursuing this opportunity; Lightspeed-backed Ocean is also analyzing email context to detect fraud and impersonation, aiming to displace established vendors like Proofpoint and Mimecast alongside newer competitors such as Abnormal Security. However, Thakker noted that AegisAI's advantage lies in its founding team's expertise: their prior roles securing Gmail, the world's most popular email system, position them well to become the leading new hack-prevention company. While the startup is currently focused on email defense, co-founder Khormaee signaled broader ambitions, stating that "the core idea of building customized, highly advanced agents that can do investigations is going to [determine] who becomes the next dominant security company," with expansion into areas such as data security planned for the future.

The rise of AI-powered phishing represents a significant shift in email security threats. Unlike traditional spam and phishing attacks that rely on generic templates or surface-level deception, AI-driven spear phishing allows attackers to rapidly aggregate publicly available information—coworker relationships, project details, travel schedules—and craft highly personalized messages that pass casual inspection. This capability has exposed a critical weakness in legacy email security systems, which depend on rule-based detection (if-then logic) that cannot adapt quickly enough to novel, context-aware threats.

AegisAI's core insight is that defending against AI attacks requires deploying AI in defense: agents that analyze each message similarly to how a human security analyst would, looking for subtle anomalies and inconsistencies that checklist-based systems would miss. The company's early traction—adoption by a dozen customers in less than a year post-launch—and the confidence of Battery Ventures' investment thesis (that email is now the primary attack surface and that AI-based defense will displace incumbent vendors) suggest that enterprise buyers view the threat as both urgent and acute enough to justify rip-and-replace of their email security stack.

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