AegisAI has raised $36 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures, bringing total funding to $49 million since its founding less than a year ago. Accel and Foundation Capital also participated. The cybersecurity startup uses AI agents to detect sophisticated phishing attacks that bypass traditional rule-based security systems. Founded by former Google employees Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, the company mimics human analysis to identify subtle anomalies in incoming messages. AegisAI plans to expand beyond email security into broader data protection. Early clients include Mash, LangChain and Lokker. The company faces competition from specialised startups like Ocean and established cybersecurity vendors integrating their own AI capabilities.

AegisAI raises $36 million Series A led by Battery Ventures to fight the new wave of AI spear phishing. PR Newswire With AI-generated email attacks up 5x in a single year and FBI-reported cybercrime losses hitting a record $20.8 billion, former Google reCAPTCHA and Safe Browsing leaders are scaling the first defense built for a world where no employee and no amount of training can spot the lure SAN FRANCISCO, July 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - AegisAI, the email security company building its own large language models (LLMs) to defend the inbox, today announced a $36 million Series A led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing investors Accel and Foundation Capital, to fight the next generation of increasingly sophisticated, AI-powered email attacks, which are having devastating consequences for individuals and organizations. The round brings the company's total funding to $49 million, less than a year after the company emerged from stealth. AegisAI will use the funding to scale its fleet of autonomous defense agents, accelerate general availability of Vanguard, its agent that hunts threats beyond the inbox, and expand enterprise go-to-market. AI has enabled a new form of attack dubbed AI spear phishing. These attacks use LLMs to scan the internet for information about a victim and create highly targeted personalized lures designed to trick people into sharing sensitive data, downloading malware or sending money. This risk is turbocharged by the rising use of AI by individuals and workers. More widespread use of AI agents, which do work on someone's behalf without human involvement, creates a huge new attack surface for criminals, who may be able to operate undetected for long periods of time. AegisAI's technology works by leveraging intelligent language models and an orchestrated network of AI agents to analyze and act on email threats in real time, essentially fighting AI attacks with AI. The company's adaptive platform uses sophisticated reasoning to evaluate the specific intent of suspicious emails, instead of simply looking for patterns from past scams. This enables users to more quickly detect fraud, which is critical as the volume of email phishing has increased dramatically since the launch of ChatGPT. "The most immediate, catastrophic risk to your organization isn't an AI agent hacking your firewall. It's an AI model manipulating someone in your organization into handing over the keys, often through the most trusted, most vulnerable contact of the person it's targeting," said Cy Khormaee, co-founder and CEO of AegisAI. "You cannot patch human trust. If your security program still relies on template-based phishing tests and awareness training, you are training your people to spot last year's threat, not a capable agent crafting a novel lure just for them. When the attack is AI, the defense has to be AI."