Shay Shwartz knows a lot about email phishing attacks. He earned money as a hacker as a teenager, but after being arrested at 16, he realized he could use his cyber skills to prevent attacks rather than launch them.
He then spent about a decade in high-level cybersecurity positions, leading major projects for Israel’s elite defense and intelligence units, including work related to the Iron Dome project, before joining Axis, the startup later acquired by HPE.
He had always been eager to launch his own startup, and two years ago, he finally took the plunge.
His startup Ocean, an agent messaging security platform designed to combat AI-based attacks, just emerged from stealth mode with $28 million in total funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. High-profile angel investors also joined the round, including Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, as well as Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, the co-founders of Armis, which recently sold to ServiceNow for $7.75 billion.
While established vendors like Proofpoint and Mimecast, as well as newer players like Abnormal Security, help detect standard phishing attacks, Shwartz (pictured right next to co-founder and CTO Oran Moyal) says AI requires a different defensive approach.
In the past, only very sophisticated hackers could carry out spear phishing due to the time, research and manual labor required to launch targeted attacks.
“AI has just made the whole process automatic, so the scale is much bigger now,” Shwartz told TechCrunch. “I can have LLM go figure out exactly who you are, harvest a large amount of public information, and create highly targeted phishing attacks against you.”
Ocean claims its AI can deeply analyze the context of each incoming email to detect fraud and identity theft attempts.
The startup already reviews billions of emails each month for clients including Kayak, Kingston Technology and Headspace.
Shwartz said Ocean built a small language model designed to quickly analyze emails, understand the sender’s intent and evaluate it against the user’s specific organizational context.
“It’s like having a guard at every door,” Shwartz said. “This is how we make the inbox a safe and highly hygienic place.”
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Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Before joining TechCrunch, she wrote about venture capital for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned her CFA designation.
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