AegisAI, a startup founded by former Google security executives Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, has raised a $36 million Series A led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing investors Accel and Foundation Capital, bringing total funding to $49 million.
The company builds AI agents designed to detect spear phishing attacks, which are increasingly generated using AI that aggregates personal details about targets, such as coworkers, projects, and travel, to craft convincing malicious messages. Khormaee and Luo, who previously worked on Google’s safe browsing technology and reCAPTCHA, said traditional rule-based email security systems are too slow and rigid to catch these AI-generated threats, prompting them to build agents that analyze messages more like a human would, catching subtle anomalies that fixed checklists miss, including malicious PDF attachments with embedded passwords or CAPTCHAs designed to evade spam filters.
Less than a year after launching, AegisAI says its technology has been adopted by dozens of customers, including Mesh, LangChain, and Lokker. Khormaee said AI-powered attacks now bypass existing defenses more than half the time, nearly doubling their effectiveness compared to before. Battery Ventures general partner Dharmesh Thakker said rising email-based AI attacks make agentic defense a top priority for companies, and cited the founders’ Gmail security background as a key differentiator. AegisAI plans to eventually expand beyond email into broader data security defense.
Featured image: Credit: AegisAI
