Ocean, an agentic email security platform built to fight AI-powered attacks, emerged from stealth mode with $28 million in total funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners.

Angel investors in the round included Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz; Yevgeny Dibrov; and Nadir Izrael. Dibrov and Izrael are co-founders of Armis, which was sold to ServiceNow for $7.75 billion.

Ocean was launched two years ago by founder Shay Shwartz, who made money as a hacker as a teenager and was caught hacking at age 16. He spent about a decade in cybersecurity roles, leading major projects for defense and intelligence units in Israel, including work connected to the Iron Dome project. He later joined Axis before it was acquired by HPE.

The company reviews billions of emails each month for customers including Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace. Ocean built a small language model tailored to quickly analyze emails, understand the sender's intent, and evaluate it against the user's specific organizational context, Shwartz said. The company claims that its AI can thoroughly analyze the context of every incoming email to detect fraud and impersonation attempts.

Shwartz described how attackers are using large language models to scale targeted phishing campaigns. "AI just made the entire process automatic, so the scale is much, much bigger now," he said. "I can instruct LLM to go and understand exactly who you are, harvest large amount of public information, and create those phishing attacks very targeted against you."

Describing Ocean's approach to inbox protection, Shwartz said, "This is like having a guard in every door. This is how we make the inbox a safe place with high hygiene."