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. Additional angel investors include Assaf Rappaport (Wiz), Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael (Armis), and Dor Knafo (former CEO of Axis Security and General Partner at Cyberstarts), among other leading angel investors. Ocean is introducing the first AI-native email security platform built on autonomous investigation, protects hundreds of thousands of mailboxes, and replaces legacy detection-based approaches that fail against modern, sophisticated AI-powered attacks. 

Email remains the primary attack vector for enterprises, with more than 90% of successful cyber-attacks starting with a phishing email. Spear phishing was once the domain of sophisticated actors, highly targeted, context-rich attacks that were devastating but rare because they didn't scale. AI broke that model. These attacks are now easy to generate, deeply personalized, and infinitely scalable, eliminating the very patterns and anomalies that traditional detection systems were built to catch.

“The challenge is no longer simply detecting malicious emails, it’s understanding the intent within increasingly realistic communication,” said Shay Shwartz, CEO and co-founder of Ocean. “Security teams are wasting significant efforts looking for outliers in a world where attacks are designed to look normal. AI-powered attackers go beyond the signals traditional tools measure, blending seamlessly into normal business communication by leveraging AI to produce flawless language, reference real projects, and convincingly mimic legitimate relationships and behaviors. Ocean replaces surface-level detection with AI agents that analyze every email as a dynamic investigation, understanding context, verifying signals, and uncovering nefarious intent at scale.” 

Ocean already replaces legacy detection-based approaches entirely with autonomous investigation and is already securing complex enterprise environments from Global Fortune 500 organizations to companies like Kayak and Headspace.

"We invested in a team and a vision, but the thesis was undeniable. AI broke email security, and it handed attackers an unfair advantage overnight. What stood out was that the team came from the offensive side,” Mike Fey, co-founder and CEO of Island. “They don't just understand the threat landscape - they used to shape it as attackers. AI is a prime technology to solve it once and for all. It excels at understanding language, intent, and context. Exactly what email security solution requires. Right team, right time.” 

At the core of the platform is Ray, Ocean’s central autonomous intelligence engine, which continuously analyzes emails, incorporates organizational context, and improves decision-making 24/7. By turning every email into an investigated event, Ocean enables enterprises to:

• Examine every email to uncover the “smoking gun,” enabling real-time remediation of attacks that appear indistinguishable from legitimate communication

• Move beyond pattern matching and anomaly detection to address both current threats and the next generation of AI-driven attacks

• Automate investigation and response workflows, reducing operational burden while enabling security teams to scale with speed and confidence 

“We look for companies that emerge when a market's foundational assumptions are breaking,” said David Gussarsky, Lightspeed Venture Partners. “Email security is at one of those moments. The scale and realism of today’s attacks are forcing organizations to rethink strategy. Ocean stood out to us not just for its technical approach, but for the clarity of its vision and the team’s deep experience in AI and in both the offensive and defensive sides of email security. That combination is why we believe Ocean is uniquely positioned to define this next phase of the market.” 

Ocean will use the new funding to deepen its investment in AI research and development, expand its AI-native infrastructure, and continue building a platform where every layer, from product to operations, is powered by AI agents.  

About Ocean

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. The company is headquartered in New York City and Tel Aviv and is backed by leading investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Picture Capital, and Cerca Partners.