Ocean, an agentic email security startup founded by former Israeli defence cybersecurity expert Shay Shwartz, has emerged from stealth with $28 million in funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. Angel investors include Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport and Armis co-founders Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael.
Shwartz, who began his career as a teenage hacker before spending a decade on elite Israeli defence and intelligence projects including work connected to the Iron Dome, founded Ocean with co-founder and CTO Oran Moyal to address a threat that existing vendors were not built to handle. He argued that AI had automated spear-phishing at unprecedented scale, enabling attackers to harvest public data and generate highly targeted attacks that previously required significant manual effort.
Ocean’s platform deploys a small language model purpose-built to analyse email context, assess sender intent, and evaluate each message against organisational patterns. The company is already processing billions of emails monthly for clients including Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace.
Featured image: Credit: Ocean
