AegisAI raises $36M to fight AI-driven spear phishing with autonomous agents

AegisAI, founded by former Google security execs, lands $36M to stop AI-driven spear phishing

Hackers are increasingly using AI to launch attacks on a massive scale, with email emerging as a primary target. AI can quickly aggregate personal information -- such as information about coworkers, active projects, and recent travel itineraries -- allowing bad actors to instantly craft convincing messages that look authentic. Last year, former Google security executives Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, who previously worked on developing safe browsing technology and reCAPTCHA, teamed up to launch AegisAI, a startup that uses AI agents to stomp out these threats, known as spear phishing. With a decade of experience preventing email hacks, the AegisAI co-founders realized that existing rule-based systems for preventing hacks -- relying on "if-then" logic -- are too slow and limited to catching AI-crafted malicious emails. So they developed AI agents that quickly analyze each message as a human would, paying attention to small anomalies that even the most elaborate checklist wouldn't catch. Less than a year after its launch, AegisAI says its tech has been adopted by dozens of customers, including crypto payments company Mash, AI startup LangChain, and Google-owned privacy compliance platform Lokker. That demand has just helped AegisAI raise a $36 million Series A led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing backers Accel and Foundation Capital. The fresh funding brings the startup's total capital to $49 million. "AI-powered attacks bypass existing controls more than half the time now, which means they're almost twice as effective as they used to be," Khormaee told TechCrunch. "They've researched you, they understand everything about you, and they're targeting attacks that are perfectly bespoke to you." Khormaee claims that AegisAI's agents can spot threats traditional email security systems may miss entirely. For instance, the startup's AI can catch malicious PDF attachments that look legitimate at first, including ones with built-in passwords and CAPTCHAs, which are often used to fool standard spam filters. When Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures, noticed an increase in email attacks, he set out to invest in a startup that could defend against AI with AI, one aiming to replace legacy email security tools with agentic-driven defense. "The bad guys are using email to attack us using AI at a much faster pace than we can keep up with," Thakker told TechCrunch. "Defending against that is going to be a number one priority for a lot of companies." AegisAI isn't the only startup using AI to analyze the context of every incoming email to detect fraud and impersonation attempts. Lightspeed-backed Ocean is also trying to displace established vendors like Proofpoint and Mimecast, along with newer players like Abnormal Security. However, given that AegisAI is led by experts who helped secure Gmail, the most popular email system in the world, Thakker believes the startup has the best shot at becoming the leading new hack-prevention company. While AegisAI is starting with email, the startup has its sights on eventually expanding to other areas of defense, such as data security. "The core idea of building customized, highly advanced agents that can do investigations is going to [determine] who becomes the next dominant security company," Khormaee said.

AegisAI banks $36M as AI spear phishing surges fivefold in a year

Email security startup AegisAI Inc. today said it has raised $36 million in new funding to counter a fast-growing class of artificial intelligence-generated email attacks that no amount of employee training can reliably stop. The San Francisco company builds its own large language models to guard corporate inboxes. The pitch rests on how much the phishing lure has changed. An attacker used to need time and skill. Now AI does the legwork. It scrapes the web for details about the target. It works out which colleague or vendor that person leans on. Then it drafts a note in that trusted voice, at scale. AegisAI calls the technique AI spear phishing, and it says the capability now runs about the price of a cup of coffee. The company runs a network of autonomous AI agents inside the inbox. Traditional filters look for patterns lifted from past scams. AegisAI's agents read the intent and identity behind each message, an approach it says catches linguistically flawless attacks that clear every technical check. The company claims it cuts false positives by up to 90% against legacy tools. AI-generated spear phishing made up 2.8% of the phishing AegisAI observed in early 2025 and reached 13.9% by the end of the year. That finding comes from a study the company presented at this year's M3AAWG conference, drawn from a pool of more than 20,000 malicious emails. The AI notes were also harder to stop. They reached the inbox at close to twice the rate of human-written attacks. Of the ones that got through, almost 73% had cleared email authentication, sent from real accounts that attackers had quietly taken over. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's latest Internet Crime Report lands in the same place. Victims reported a record $20.8 billion in losses last year. Business email compromise, which turns on identity rather than malware, made up $11.64 billion of that. Ransomware and malicious software combined did not come close. "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," said Cy Khormaee, co-founder and chief executive of AegisAI. "You cannot patch human trust. When the attack is AI, the defense has to be AI." Khormaee started the company in 2025 with Ryan Luo. The two spent years in Google LLC's core security group, where they helped build reCAPTCHA, Safe Browsing and Web Risk. AegisAI launched publicly in September and has since signed dozens of customers across fintech and technology, including crypto payments company Mesh Connect Inc. and AI developer platform LangChain Inc.. At web privacy company firm Lokker, it says its agents caught an attack routed through a vendor's compromised Salesforce Inc. systems, a message that carried no malicious link or attachment. The new money will scale AegisAI's roster of defense agents and push toward general availability for Vanguard, the company's threat-hunting agent that works outside the inbox. Introduced in March, Vanguard follows suspicious links and attachments onto the open web and returns a threat report within minutes Battery Ventures LP led the Series A round, with existing backers Accel Partners LP and Foundation Capital joining. Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures, said generative AI "just broke every assumption legacy email security was built on," leaving a machine-speed defense as the only viable answer. The financing brings AegisAI's total raised to $49 million, less than a year after its public launch.