AegisAI, a startup founded by two former Google security executives, Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, has raised $36 million in a funding round led by Battery Ventures. Existing investors Accel and Foundation Capital also joined. The round brings the company's total funding to $49 million, following a $13 million raise reported by TechCrunch in September 2025. (TechCrunch)

Khormaee and Luo previously worked on safe browsing and reCAPTCHA at Google. Their new company uses AI agents, software programs that can act on their own to investigate suspicious emails, to detect and block a specific type of cyberattack called spear phishing. Spear phishing is when a scammer targets a specific person or organization with a convincing fake message, rather than sending out millions of generic scam emails. Khormaee says these attacks get past existing security tools more than half the time.

The reason this matters is that generative AI has changed the game for scammers. In the past, phishing emails were often full of grammar mistakes and obvious red flags. Now, attackers can use AI tools to write messages that are grammatically perfect and contextually detailed, making them much harder to spot. They can also wrap the dangerous part of the attack, like a malicious file, inside interactive elements such as password-protected PDFs or fake CAPTCHA screens that traditional spam filters cannot examine. AegisAI's approach is to use AI that can reason about and investigate these messages in the same way an attacker used AI to create them.

Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures, led the investment. Named customers include crypto payments company Mash, AI startup LangChain, and Google-owned privacy compliance platform Lokker. (TechCrunch)

The competitive landscape is crowded. TechCrunch names Lightspeed-backed Ocean, Proofpoint, Mimecast, and Abnormal Security as competitors. Proofpoint and Mimecast are large, established companies with many enterprise customers already using their email security products. Abnormal Security has built a strong position by applying machine learning to email threats and has been well-funded itself. Ocean, backed by Lightspeed, is a newer company pursuing a similar AI-focused approach. AegisAI is betting that its founders' background in large-scale abuse detection at Google gives them an edge. (TechCrunch)

The company plans to eventually expand beyond email security into broader data security, though the new funding appears focused on improving the current product. This expansion path mirrors a pattern seen across the security industry, where companies that get a foothold in one area use it to enter related ones. Whether AegisAI can make that transition is an open question, but the intent signals ambition beyond being just a phishing defense tool. (TechCrunch)

The broader context here is Khormaee's claim that AI-powered attacks bypass existing controls more than half the time. If accurate across more deployments, that figure points to a significant gap in how most organizations currently protect their email. The existing vendors are not standing still, and companies like Proofpoint and Abnormal are also adding AI to their detection systems. What AegisAI is betting on is that an agent-based approach, where AI systems actively probe and analyze suspicious content rather than running it through a standard filter, will prove more effective against AI-driven attacks than current methods.

There is a symmetry worth noting: the same generation of AI making phishing more dangerous is also enabling better defense. The open question for AegisAI and its competitors is whether the attacker's advantage in creating new attacks at scale can be offset by a defender's ability to reason about those attacks in real time. The market is placing bets on that question, and Battery Ventures' $36 million is one of them.

The customer list, while still early-stage, spans interesting areas. LangChain operates in the AI ecosystem, where employees may be more aware of AI-related threats but also more likely to encounter AI-generated content in their daily work. Mash operates in crypto payments, a sector with a long history of being targeted by sophisticated scams. Lokker, being Google-owned, adds a degree of internal validation from the same company whose former employees founded AegisAI. (TechCrunch)

The funding environment for AI security startups has stayed active even as the broader venture capital market has tightened. The pattern of a $36 million round led by a top-tier firm with strong participation from existing investors suggests that investors see a lasting category forming around AI-native security tools, not a temporary trend. In this author's view, whether AegisAI specifically captures enough of that market to justify its valuation will depend on execution against well-funded incumbents and equally well-funded newcomers. The technology thesis is sound. The go-to-market challenge is the harder problem.