HomeTeen hacker turned Iron Dome researcher raises $28M to fight AI phishing
Shay Shwartz knows email phishing attacks inside and out. As a teenager, he earned money as a hacker, but after being caught at 16, he realized he could use his cybersecurity skills to stop attacks instead of launching them.
He went on to spend nearly a decade in top cybersecurity roles, leading major projects for Israel’s elite defense and intelligence units, including work tied to the Iron Dome project, before joining Axis, the startup later acquired by HPE.
All along, he had been eager to start his own company, and two years ago, he finally took the leap.
His startup Ocean, an agentic email security platform built to combat AI-powered attacks, just emerged from stealth mode with $28 million in total funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. High-profile angel investors also joined, including Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, as well as Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, the co-founders of Armis, which recently sold to ServiceNow for $7.75 billion.
While established vendors like Proofpoint and Mimecast—along with newer players like Abnormal Security—help detect standard phishing attacks, Shwartz (pictured right next to co-founder and CTO Oran Moyal) argues that AI demands a different defensive approach.
In the past, only highly advanced hackers could pull off spear-phishing because of the time, research, and manual effort required for targeted attacks.
“AI just made the entire process automatic, so the scale is much, much bigger now,” Shwartz told TechCrunch. “I can instruct an LLM to go and understand exactly who you are, harvest a large amount of public information, and create those phishing attacks very targeted against you.”
Ocean claims its AI can thoroughly analyze the context of every incoming email to detect fraud and impersonation attempts.
The startup is already reviewing billions of emails each month for customers including Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace.
Shwartz said 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.
“This is like having a guard at every door,” Shwartz said. “This is how we make the inbox a safe place with high hygiene.”
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Shay Shwartz knows email phishing attacks inside and out. As a teenager, he earned money as a hacker, but after being caught at 16, he realized he could use his cybersecurity skills to stop attacks instead of launching them.
He went on to spend nearly a decade in top cybersecurity roles, leading major projects for Israel’s elite defense and intelligence units, including work tied to the Iron Dome project, before joining Axis, the startup later acquired by HPE.
All along, he had been eager to start his own company, and two years ago, he finally took the leap.
His startup Ocean, an agentic email security platform built to combat AI-powered attacks, just emerged from stealth mode with $28 million in total funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. High-profile angel investors also joined, including Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, as well as Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, the co-founders of Armis, which recently sold to ServiceNow for $7.75 billion.
While established vendors like Proofpoint and Mimecast—along with newer players like Abnormal Security—help detect standard phishing attacks, Shwartz (pictured right next to co-founder and CTO Oran Moyal) argues that AI demands a different defensive approach.
In the past, only highly advanced hackers could pull off spear-phishing because of the time, research, and manual effort required for targeted attacks.
“AI just made the entire process automatic, so the scale is much, much bigger now,” Shwartz told TechCrunch. “I can instruct an LLM to go and understand exactly who you are, harvest a large amount of public information, and create those phishing attacks very targeted against you.”
Ocean claims its AI can thoroughly analyze the context of every incoming email to detect fraud and impersonation attempts.
The startup is already reviewing billions of emails each month for customers including Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace.
Shwartz said 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.
“This is like having a guard at every door,” Shwartz said. “This is how we make the inbox a safe place with high hygiene.”
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