Ocean, an agentic email security platform that uses autonomous AI to investigate every incoming message, has emerged from stealth with $28m in total funding to take on a new generation of AI-driven enterprise cyber threats.
The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Picture Capital and Cerca Partners also participating. A group of prominent angel investors joined the raise, including Assaf Rappaport of Wiz, Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael of Armis, and Dor Knafo, former CEO of Axis Security and general partner at Cyberstarts.
The company positions itself as the first AI-native email security platform built around autonomous investigation rather than traditional detection, and says it is already defending hundreds of thousands of mailboxes for enterprise customers. Among those clients are Global Fortune 500 organisations as well as KAYAK, Kingston Technology, and Headspace. Ocean’s platform is designed to displace legacy tools that rely on flagging suspicious signals — an approach the company argues is no longer fit for purpose as attackers increasingly exploit AI to craft convincing, personalised messages at scale.
Central to Ocean’s offering is Ray, its autonomous investigation engine. Ray analyses every incoming email in real time, examining the sender’s identity, message content, embedded links, technical infrastructure, and the broader business context surrounding the communication. By building up a complete picture of each message rather than screening for surface-level anomalies, the platform aims to catch fraud, impersonation, and targeted attacks that would otherwise pass undetected. The system also automates the investigation and response workload that would typically fall to security operations teams, reducing manual effort and accelerating response times.
Ocean was founded on the premise that AI has fundamentally altered the threat landscape for enterprise email. Spear phishing — once the preserve of well-resourced attackers due to the time and research it required — can now be replicated at volume in seconds using AI tools. The result is a category of attack that mimics legitimate communication with high fidelity, rendering pattern-based detection systems largely ineffective. Email remains the dominant entry point for enterprise cyberattacks, with more than 90% of successful breaches traced back to phishing.
Ocean CEO and co-founder Shay Shwartz said, “The challenge is no longer just detecting malicious emails. It’s identifying harmful intent hidden inside messages that appear completely legitimate. 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.”
Lightspeed Venture’s David Gussarsky said, “We look for companies that break the way a market has worked for years. 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.”
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