Cybersecurity startup AegisAI, founded by former Google security executives, has secured $36 million in Series A funding today to combat the rapidly escalating threat of AI-driven spear-phishing attacks targeting global organisations.
The Rise of Highly Targeted AI Attacks
Cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence to launch sophisticated email attacks at an unprecedented scale. By rapidly aggregating personal data—including professional relationships, active projects, and recent travel itineraries—bad actors can instantly generate highly convincing, bespoke messages that easily deceive targets.
“AI-powered attacks bypass existing controls more than half the time now, which means they are almost twice as effective as they used to be,” AegisAI co-founder Cy Khormaee explained. “They have researched you, they understand everything about you, and they are targeting attacks that are perfectly tailored to you.”
How AegisAI Defeats Modern Cyber Threats
Launched last year by former Google security executives Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo—who previously developed safe browsing technology and reCAPTCHA—AegisAI deploys autonomous AI agents to neutralise these sophisticated spear-phishing threats.
Moving Beyond Legacy “If-Then” Security
With a decade of experience in email security, the co-founders recognised that traditional rule-based systems relying on rigid “if-then” logic are too slow and limited to detect AI-crafted malicious emails. To solve this, AegisAI developed intelligent agents that analyse each message with human-like intuition, identifying subtle anomalies that standard checklists routinely miss.
Khormaee claims that AegisAI’s agents successfully detect threats that legacy email security tools overlook. For example, the startup’s technology can identify malicious PDF attachments containing built-in passwords and CAPTCHAs—tactics specifically designed to bypass standard spam filters.
Silicon Valley Backs Agentic Email Defence
Less than a year after its launch, AegisAI’s technology has been adopted by dozens of high-profile clients, including cryptocurrency payments firm Mesh, AI startup LangChain, and privacy compliance platform Lokker. This rapid market adoption paved the way for a $36 million Series A round led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing investors Accel and Foundation Capital, bringing the startup’s total funding to $49 million.
“The bad guys are using email to attack us using AI at a much faster pace than we can keep up with,” Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures, said. Thakker, who sought to invest in a startup capable of fighting AI with AI, added: “Defending against that is going to be a number one priority for a lot of companies.”
AegisAI is entering a competitive market, joining other startups like the Lightspeed-backed Ocean in trying to displace established email security giants like Proofpoint and Mimecast, alongside newer competitors like Abnormal Security.
Future Expansion Beyond Email
However, Thakker believes AegisAI’s leadership team—having previously secured Gmail, the world’s largest email platform—gives the company a significant advantage in becoming the dominant player in modern threat prevention.
While the company is currently focused on email protection, it plans to expand its agentic defence framework to other sectors, including data security. “The core idea of building customised, highly advanced agents that can do investigations is going to determine who becomes the next dominant security company,” Khormaee noted.