en.Wedoany.com Reported - Israeli cybersecurity startup Ocean announced on May 19 that it has ended its stealth mode, officially launched its agentic email security platform, and confirmed a total cumulative funding amount of $28 million. This funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners, and angel investors including Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, as well as Armis co-founders Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael.
Ocean CEO and co-founder Shay Shwartz stated bluntly in an interview with TechCrunch: "AI has completely automated the entire attack process, and the scale of attacks now far exceeds what was possible before. I can have a large language model precisely understand who you are, scrape vast amounts of public information, and then generate highly customized phishing attacks targeting you personally." He further pointed out that in the past, only advanced hacker groups with abundant resources could launch precise spear-phishing attacks, but generative AI has leveled this barrier, leading to a simultaneous leap in both the volume and precision of attacks. Traditional filtering systems based on rules and reputation scoring are now struggling to cope.
Ocean has chosen a technical approach different from traditional detection methods. The platform has built an autonomous investigation engine called Ray, which no longer relies on passive matching against known malicious signature databases. Instead, AI agents review every inbound email in real-time, one by one, automatically verifying sender identity, email content, embedded links, technical infrastructure, and business context. It comprehensively assesses sender intent to identify fraud and impersonation hidden behind communications that appear "completely normal." Shwartz described this architecture as "placing a guard at every door." To achieve this, Ocean has specifically trained small language models to rapidly analyze emails, understand sender intent, and perform organizational-level context verification by considering the recipient's role, communication history, and typical behavioral patterns.
Ocean has cumulatively processed over 1 billion emails, with a current monthly processing volume exceeding 1 billion, protecting hundreds of thousands of corporate mailboxes. Its customers include companies like Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace, and it has replaced legacy email security tools within Fortune 500 companies. CTech, citing Ocean co-founder and CTO Oran Moyal, reported that the company has already generated seven-figure annual revenue in US dollars.
Founded in 2024, both co-founders hail from elite intelligence units of the Israel Defense Forces. Shay Shwartz engaged in hacking activities during his teenage years and, after being arrested at 16, shifted his focus to the cybersecurity defense field. He served in Israel's top defense and intelligence agencies for nearly a decade, working on projects involving the Iron Dome missile defense system, before joining the startup Axis Security, which was later acquired by HPE. Moyal also served in the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet, and previously worked at Microsoft identifying security vulnerabilities in Azure cloud products. Ocean currently has about 35 employees, with offices in New York and Tel Aviv. The company had previously completed an $8 million seed funding round in 2024, also led by Picture Capital.
David Gussarsky of Lightspeed Venture Partners stated in an investment announcement: "We look for companies that can break the way a market has operated for years. Email security is at this inflection point." As AI-generated phishing emails continue to breach traditional defense systems in terms of volume, precision, and stealth, the email security market is undergoing a paradigm shift from "detecting known threats" to "understanding unknown intent."
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