Hackers are increasingly leveraging AI to scale their attacks, with email becoming one of the primary entry points. AegisAI, founded by a former Google security executive, is betting on using AI to fight AI, and completed a $36 million Series A funding round less than a year after its founding.

Financing and Customer Progress

AegisAI was founded last year by Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo. Both previously worked in security at Google, contributing to products such as Safe Browsing and reCAPTCHA. The company believes that traditional email protection systems relying on "if-then" rules are struggling to promptly identify AI-generated, customized attack emails.

This funding round was led by Battery Ventures, with participation from Accel and Foundation Capital. Following this round, AegisAI has raised a total of $49 million.

• Series A funding: $36 million
• Total funding raised: US$49 million
• Disclosed clients include Mash, LangChain, and Lokker.

Targeting AI-generated email attacks

The company says its product has been adopted by dozens of clients in less than a year, including crypto payment company Mash, AI startup LangChain, and Google’s privacy compliance platform Lokker.

AegisAI's core product is an AI agent system used to analyze email content and context on a case-by-case basis. The company claims that this type of system pays attention to subtle anomalies, much like human review, rather than simply matching fixed rules.

Co-founder Khormaee told TechCrunch that AI-driven attacks are now significantly more likely to bypass existing defenses. Attackers can quickly aggregate personal information, including colleague relationships, ongoing projects, and recent schedules, and then use this information to generate emails that appear highly authentic.

The company also stated that its system can identify threats that traditional email security tools easily miss, such as malicious PDF attachments disguised as legitimate documents. These attachments sometimes contain passwords or CAPTCHAs to bypass common spam filtering mechanisms.

Competition in the race continues to heat up

Dharmesh Thakker, a partner at Battery Ventures, said he began looking for security companies that could "defend against AI with AI" after the increase in enterprise email attacks. He believes that as attack speed increases, email security will become a priority for more companies.

AegisAI is not the only startup in this direction. The report mentions that Ocean, which is backed by Lightspeed, is also trying to identify fraud and impersonation by analyzing the context of each email, and is competing with vendors such as Proofpoint, Mimecast, and Abnormal Security.

AegisAI is currently focusing on email scenarios, but the company says it plans to expand into broader defense areas such as data security in the future.