Ocean emerges from stealth with $28M to fight AI-powered phishing

Ocean has officially emerged from stealth mode—a term for operating without a public product launch—with $28 million in total funding. The $28 million round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. Angel investors also joined the round, including Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, alongside Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, the co-founders of Armis, which was acquired by ServiceNow for $7.75 billion.

The startup was founded two years ago by Shay Shwartz and co-founder and CTO Oran Moyal. Shwartz, a former hacker who was caught at age 16, realized he could use his talents to prevent attacks and went on to spend about a decade in cybersecurity roles, including work connected to the Iron Dome project. He also worked at Axis, a startup that was later acquired by HPE, before launching Ocean. Shwartz argues that artificial intelligence has fundamentally altered the threat landscape by automating highly targeted phishing attacks at a much larger scale. According to Shwartz, the founder of Ocean, “AI just made the entire process automatic, so the scale is much, much bigger now.”

To counter these threats, Ocean deployed an agentic email security platform—meaning it uses autonomous, AI-driven systems—to defend inboxes. While competitors like Proofpoint and Mimecast, along with Abnormal Security, help detect standard phishing attacks, Shwartz argues that AI-driven threats require a different defensive approach. To address this, Ocean built a small language model tailored to analyze email context and sender intent, evaluating it against an organization’s specific context. The startup claims its AI can thoroughly analyze the context of every incoming email to detect fraud and impersonation attempts. The platform is already reviewing billions of emails each month for customers, including Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace. Shwartz compared this approach to placing a guard at every door to maintain high hygiene and keep the inbox safe.

Why it matters

Ocean is positioning its agentic email security platform as a necessary evolution in defense against AI-powered phishing. The startup’s leadership argues that the increased scale of these automated attacks has rendered the defensive approaches of established security vendors insufficient.