AegisAI raises $36M Series A to counter AI-driven spear-phishing with agentic email defense

AegisAI was co-founded by Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, former Google security executives who worked on safe browsing and reCAPTCHA, to address the rise of AI-crafted spear-phishing emails that evade traditional rule-based defenses.

The startup says its AI agents analyze each incoming message for subtle anomalies and context, similar to human review, to catch malicious PDFs with embedded passwords or CAPTCHAs that standard spam filters often overlook.

AegisAI reports adoption by dozens of customers, including crypto payments company Mash, AI startup LangChain, and Google-owned privacy compliance platform Lokker.

The $36M Series A was led by Battery Ventures, with participation from Accel and Foundation Capital, bringing total funding to $49M.

Khormaee told TechCrunch that AI-powered attacks bypass existing controls more than half the time and are nearly twice as effective as prior methods due to their bespoke targeting.

Dharmesh Thakker of Battery Ventures said defending against AI-driven email attacks is a top priority for companies, motivating the investment in agentic defenses to replace legacy tools.

AegisAI competes with other AI-native email security startups such as Lightspeed-backed Ocean, which also aims to displace incumbents like Proofpoint and Mimecast.

While starting with email security, AegisAI intends to expand its agentic approach to other areas of data security in the future.