level: business
shay shwartz started hacking as a teenager, got caught at 16, and shifted to defense. he later worked on israel's iron dome project and at axis before founding ocean two years ago. the startup just came out of stealth with $28 million in total funding led by lightspeed venture partners, with participation from picture capital and cerca partners. angel investors include wiz ceo assaf rappaport and armis co-founders yevgeny dibrov and nadir izrael.
ocean builds an agentic email security platform to counter ai-powered phishing. shwartz says large language models let attackers automate research and craft highly targeted scams at scale, making traditional defenses insufficient. ocean's system uses a small language model to analyze each email's context, sender intent, and organizational fit. it already reviews billions of emails monthly for customers like kayak, kingston technology, and headspace.
the approach treats every email as a potential threat, acting like a guard at each door. shwartz claims this keeps inboxes safe with high hygiene. the funding will help ocean expand its ai-driven detection as phishing grows more sophisticated. the startup competes with established vendors like proofpoint and mimecast, plus newer ones like abnormal security, but bets on its agentic, context-aware model to stand out.
why it matters: ai-generated phishing is scaling rapidly, and traditional filters struggle to catch context-aware attacks, so new detection methods are critical for data security.