AegisAI raises $36M Series A to stop AI-driven spear phishing

Hackers are increasingly turning to AI to launch attacks at scale, with email emerging as a favorite target. AI can quickly aggregate details about a target — co-workers, active projects, recent travel — letting attackers instantly craft convincing messages that look authentic.

Former Google security executives Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, who previously worked on Google’s safe-browsing technology and reCAPTCHA, teamed up last year to launch AegisAI, a startup using AI agents to stop these AI-crafted attacks, known as spear phishing. With a decade of experience preventing email hacks, the co-founders concluded that existing rule-based, “if-then” detection systems are too slow and too limited to catch AI-generated malicious emails, so they built AI agents that analyze each message the way a human would, catching small anomalies that even an elaborate checklist would miss.

Less than a year after launch, AegisAI says its technology has been adopted by dozens of customers, including crypto payments company Mesh, AI startup LangChain, and privacy-compliance platform Lokker. That traction helped it raise a $36 million Series A led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing backers Accel and Foundation Capital, bringing the startup’s total funding to $49 million. “AI-powered attacks bypass existing controls more than half the time now, which means they’re almost twice as effective as they used to be,” Khormaee told TechCrunch, adding that attackers now research their targets closely enough to craft attacks that feel personally tailored.

Khormaee says AegisAI’s agents can catch threats traditional email security tools might miss entirely, including malicious PDF attachments that look legitimate but carry built-in passwords and CAPTCHA challenges — a tactic often used to fool standard spam filters. Battery Ventures general partner Dharmesh Thakker said he set out to back a startup that could fight AI with AI after noticing a rise in email attacks, arguing that AI-driven email attacks are moving faster than defenders can keep pace, and that countering them will become a top priority for many companies.

AegisAI isn’t alone in using AI to analyze the context of incoming email for fraud and impersonation: Lightspeed-backed Ocean is also trying to displace established vendors like Proofpoint and Mimecast, along with newer players like Abnormal Security. But Thakker believes AegisAI’s roots — led by people who helped secure Gmail — give it the best shot at becoming the leading hack-prevention company. AegisAI is starting with email, but the founders say they eventually want to expand into other areas of defense, such as data security.

Why it matters

The round signals investors see AI-native, agent-based tools — not rule-based filters — as the necessary answer to attacks that research targets closely enough to impersonate colleagues convincingly.