AegisAI raises $36m as AI phishing defeats legacy security
A new wave of AI agents designed to replace outdated email filters has secured $36 million in funding, highlighting an urgent market shift as AI-driven phishing attacks successfully bypass traditional corporate defences more than half the time.
AegisAI, a cybersecurity startup founded by former Google executives, has raised $36 million in a Series A round led by Battery Ventures. Existing backers Accel and Foundation Capital also participated, bringing the company’s total capital to $49 million.
The funding underscores a rapidly escalating threat for European businesses. Hackers are using artificial intelligence to harvest personal details—such as co-worker names, active projects, and travel itineraries—to automate highly convincing spear-phishing emails at scale. Because these attacks are bespoke, they easily evade the legacy security systems still widely used across European enterprises.
“AI-powered attacks bypass existing controls more than half the time now, which means they’re almost twice as effective as they used to be,” said Cy Khormaee, who co-founded AegisAI with Ryan Luo. “They’ve researched you, they understand everything about you, and they’re targeting attacks that are perfectly bespoke to you.”
Traditional email security platforms rely on rigid, rule-based "if-then" logic that cannot keep pace with AI-generated messages. AegisAI deploys autonomous AI agents that analyse each email for subtle anomalies, mimicking human scrutiny. The system catches sophisticated threats that standard spam filters miss, such as malicious PDF attachments disguised with built-in passwords and CAPTCHAs.
For corporate security leaders, the investment signals an urgent need to audit existing defences. Established vendors like Proofpoint and Mimecast, alongside newer entrants like Abnormal Security, now face direct competition from AI-native startups. AegisAI and Lightspeed-backed Ocean are both attempting to displace legacy tools with agentic-driven defences.
“The bad guys are using email to attack us using AI at a much faster pace than we can keep up with,” said Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures. “Defending against that is going to be a number one priority for a lot of companies.”
Thakker argued that AegisAI’s founders, who previously developed safe browsing technology and reCAPTCHA for Gmail, give the startup a structural advantage. Less than a year after launching, the company has secured dozens of customers, including crypto payments firm Mesh, AI startup LangChain, and privacy compliance platform Lokker.
While the company is currently focused on email, it plans to expand its agent technology into broader data security.
