AegisAI secured a $36 million Series A led by Battery Ventures, lifting its total funding to $49 million to expand AI agent defenses against surging AI generated spear phishing attacks.
AegisAI’s $36 million Series A funding, led by Battery Ventures with participation from existing investors Accel and Foundation Capital, brings the San Francisco-based company’s total capital raised to $49 million less than a year after emerging from stealth.
The company was founded in 2025 by Cy Khormaee (CEO) and Ryan Luo (CTO), former Google security executives who spent nearly a decade building and operating systems that protect billions of users, including reCAPTCHA, Safe Browsing, and Web Risk. AegisAI launched publicly in September 2025 with a $13 million seed round co-led by Accel and Foundation Capital.
Email remains the dominant initial vector for cyberattacks. Generative AI has transformed spear phishing economics: attackers can now research targets, map professional relationships, and generate highly personalized lures at near zero marginal cost, often described as the price of a cup of coffee. AegisAI’s own analysis of more than 20,000 malicious emails, presented at the M3AAWG conference, showed AI generated spear phishing rising from 2.8% of observed phishing in early 2025 to 13.9% by year end (a roughly fivefold increase). These AI crafted messages reached inboxes at nearly twice the rate of human written attacks; of those that arrived, nearly 73% had cleared standard email authentication because they originated from compromised legitimate accounts.
Founder Cy Khormaee has stated that AI powered attacks now bypass existing controls more than half the time, nearly twice their prior effectiveness. FBI Internet Crime Report data underscores the financial stakes: $20.8 billion in total reported losses, with business email compromise (BEC) alone accounting for $11.64 billion. Traditional rule, signature, and reputation based email security gateways struggle against linguistically flawless, zero payload, and “adversary in the middle” attacks that exploit human trust rather than software vulnerabilities.
What is AegisAI’s technology?
AegisAI positions itself as an agentic, AI native email security platform rather than a conventional secure email gateway. It deploys an orchestrated network of autonomous AI agents, powered by proprietary large language models, that analyze every inbound message in real time for intent, identity, behavioral anomalies, language patterns, sender context, attachments, links, metadata, and QR codes. The system does not rely on static rules or signatures; agents adapt continuously and coordinate to detect phishing, BEC, social engineering, malware, and zero day threats.
Key claimed differentiators include:
- Up to 90% reduction in false positives versus legacy tools, reducing alert fatigue.
- API only deployment for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace with no MX record changes, no mail flow disruption, and integration times measured in minutes.
- Automated quarantine, remediation, and investigation.
- VIP/role based threat visibility and executive dashboards.
- SOC 2 Type II certification with encryption in transit and at rest; the platform minimizes storage of full email content.
In March 2026 the company introduced Vanguard, a companion agent that extends investigation beyond the inbox. When an inbox agent flags a suspicious link or attachment, Vanguard follows it onto the open web (navigating as a human user would, including handling adversarial CAPTCHAs, cloaked pages, and password protected or weaponized documents) and returns a threat report within minutes. The new capital is explicitly earmarked to scale the fleet of defense agents and accelerate Vanguard toward general availability.
Early customers include Mesh (crypto payments), LangChain (AI tooling), and Lokker (privacy compliance), along with others in fintech, technology, and AI sectors. Testimonials highlight rapid deployment, immediate visibility into previously missed threats (including AI generated spear phishing and compromised vendor attacks carrying no malicious payload), and elimination of rule management overhead.
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How will AegisAI use the funds?
Proceeds will fund:
- Expansion of the autonomous agent roster.
- General availability of Vanguard.
- Enterprise go to market acceleration.
Longer term, leadership has signaled ambitions beyond email into broader data protection and security, arguing that customized, investigation capable agents represent the architecture of the next dominant security platforms.
The email security market is crowded with incumbents (Proofpoint, Mimecast, Microsoft Defender) and AI native challengers (including Abnormal Security and Lightspeed backed Ocean). AegisAI differentiates on founder pedigree in large scale Google security infrastructure, fully agentic rather than rule augmented detection, API first ease of deployment, and the extension of investigation outside the inbox via Vanguard.
Battery Ventures general partner Dharmesh Thakker framed the investment around the structural break caused by generative AI: legacy tools’ core assumptions no longer hold, making machine speed, agentic defense a priority. The rapid progression from $13 million seed to $36 million Series A in under a year reflects investor conviction in both the threat trajectory and the founding team’s ability to build defenses at the required scale and precision.
The $36 million Series A validates AegisAI’s thesis that AI driven attacks require AI driven, agent based defenses that operate at the speed and contextual depth of the threats themselves. With strong technical founders, early customer traction in high value sectors, measurable claims on false positive reduction and deployment simplicity, and a clear product roadmap centered on expanding agent capabilities, the company is positioned to pursue category leadership in next generation email security while laying groundwork for broader agentic security applications. The round arrives at a moment when both the volume and sophistication of AI enabled email attacks are demonstrably accelerating, giving the capital clear near term application in scaling detection capacity and commercial reach.
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