Email Security Startup Ocean Lands $20 Million Series A to Fight AI-Powered Phishing
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Ocean, a cybersecurity company that uses artificial intelligence to defend against email threats, has closed a $20 million Series A round. The investment arrives as phishing attacks grow harder to spot, with attackers increasingly using AI to craft messages that look entirely legitimate.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round. Picture Capital, which is the fund run by Island founders Mike Fey and Dan Amiga, also took part, along with Transmit founders Rakesh Loonkar and Mickey Boodaei and Cerca Partners. A number of well-known angel investors joined as well, including Wiz chief executive Assaf Rappaport, Armis founders Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, and Axis Security chief executive Dor Knafo, who also serves as a partner at Cyberstarts. The company had previously closed an $8 million seed round in 2024, a round that Picture Capital also led. Ocean Security currently has a team of roughly 35 people.
The business was started in 2024 by Shay Shwartz and Oran Moyal. Both founders served in elite units within the IDF Intelligence Corps before being asked to build a joint unit for the IDF and Shin Bet, where they ran significant projects across four years and earned personal recognition, including the Israel Security Award. After leaving the military, Shwartz went on to Axis Security, which was later bought by HPE, while Moyal worked at VisibleRisk, acquired by BitSight, and then at Microsoft, where he set up a team focused on finding security gaps in Azure cloud products. Their experience in the defense sector is where the concept for Ocean Security took shape, after they noticed how few effective tools existed to stop email-based phishing.
The company positions its technology as a replacement for older phishing defenses, which it argues were designed for a different generation of threats centered on malicious links. Ocean says its platform reaches seven-figure revenues and is already swapping out legacy products inside customer environments.
Ocean now guards enterprise systems that span Fortune 500 companies and global names such as Kayak, Kingston, and Headspace. The platform processed more than a billion emails in its first year and now handles a comparable volume every month, protecting hundreds of thousands of mailboxes around the world. The company reports that it has stopped attacks that could have resulted in tens of millions of dollars in losses.
According to the company, the central problem in security today is no longer flagging anomalies but reading intent and context. Ocean’s platform relies on AI agents that examine each email as it arrives, working much like human security analysts. Rather than depending on pattern matching alone, the system weighs the sender’s identity, the content of the message, the surrounding organizational context, and any embedded links to catch phishing and social engineering, even when a message looks normal. It connects to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 within minutes through an API, offering protection right away along with a review of earlier communications. By automating investigative work, the platform lightens the load on security teams while keeping detection accurate at scale.
The fresh capital will go toward expanding AI research, tripling the size of the team within a year, and speeding up development of the platform as demand rises for defenses against more sophisticated AI-driven attacks.