Ocean, the first Agentic Email Security platform, today announced its launch from stealth with $28 million in total funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. Ocean is introducing the first AI-native email security platform built on autonomous investigation, already protecting hundreds of thousands of mailboxes while replacing legacy detection-based tools that can no longer stop modern, sophisticated AI-powered attacks.
Ocean raises $28M led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners.
Angel investors include Assaf Rappaport (Wiz), Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael (Armis), and Dor Knafo (Cyberstarts).
Ocean protects Global Fortune 500 customers including KAYAK, Kingston Technology, and Headspace.
Ray autonomous investigation engine reviews every email in real time for sender, content, links, infrastructure, and business context.
Ocean has scanned over one billion emails within first year, now processes more than one billion emails every month.
Founded in 2024 by Shay Shwartz and Oran Moyal, headquartered in New York City and Tel Aviv.
“The challenge is no longer just detecting malicious emails. It's identifying harmful intent hidden inside messages that appear completely legitimate,” said Shay Shwartz, CEO and co-founder of Ocean. “Attackers now use AI to write flawlessly, reference real projects, and impersonate trusted colleagues, making it nearly impossible to spot the difference. Security teams end up spending too much time chasing outliers while the attacks that actually matter are designed to blend in. Ocean replaces surface-level filtering with AI agents that investigate every email, verify context, and identify malicious intent at scale.”
“We look for companies that break the way a market has worked for years,” said David Gussarsky of Lightspeed Venture. “Email security is at that point. The old model of flagging suspicious signals is no longer enough. Ocean replaces that with autonomous investigation, analyzing every email for context and intent instead of relying on detection. That's a real shift in how this category operates.”
“AI broke email security and handed attackers an unfair advantage overnight,” said Mike Fey, GP at Picture Capital and CEO of Island. “What drew us to this team is that they came from the offensive side. They know this world because they used to operate in it. Now they're using AI to solve the problem once and for all.”
Email remains the primary entry point for enterprise attacks, with more than 90% of successful cyberattacks starting with phishing. AI has enabled highly personalized attacks to be generated in seconds and launched at volume, eliminating the patterns and anomalies that traditional detection systems were built to catch. At the center of the Ocean platform is Ray, the autonomous investigation engine, which reviews every email in real time, checking sender, content, links, technical infrastructure, and business context to determine whether a message can be trusted. By automating investigation and response, Ocean eliminates the manual workload of SecOps teams and enables faster response times.
Ocean is the first Agentic Email Security Platform built for the era of AI-powered attacks. The platform uses a network of AI agents to investigate every email in real time, analyzing behavior, validating intent, and uncovering hidden threats that traditional email security tools miss. Ocean has scanned over one billion emails within its first year, now processes more than one billion emails every month, and protects more than hundreds of thousands of employee mailboxes globally. Led by former nation-state operators and elite AI researchers, Ocean was founded in 2024 by co-founders Shay Shwartz and Oran Moyal, Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus.
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