AegisAI is increasingly helping hackers to launch mass-scale email attacks, former Google security leaders have joined forces to build autonomous AI agents that aim to stop phishing, malware, and business email compromise threats before they ever reach user inboxes.
That is the mission behind AegisAI, a new email security startup that has just emerged from stealth with $13 million in seed funding co-led by Accel and Foundation Capital.
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More than 90% of successful cyberattacks begin with a phishing email, per U.S. federal cybersecurity agency CISA. A recent CrowdStrike study (PDF) also found that phishing messages generated by large language models (LLMs) had a 54% click-through rate in 2024, far higher than the 12% rate for human-written emails.
AegisAI aims to counter this growing threat with its suite of autonomous AI agents.
Founded by former Google Safe Browsing and reCAPTCHA executives Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, the startup offers an orchestrated network of real-time AI agents that inspect, analyze, and neutralize email threats autonomously, without relying on any specific set of rules. This approach challenges typical email security platforms that rely on static rules and often require extensive user training.
“The sum of all evil is a PDF attachment in an email. That’s always where all the attacks started, and so I really wanted to solve this problem,” Khormaee said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch.
Khormaee was head of product and director of product management at Google for over five years until July 2023. During that time, he led the security team responsible for protecting Google, its 4 billion users, and 4 million websites from phishing, malware, and fraud, using products like Safe Browsing, reCAPTCHA, and Web Risk. It was also during this time that he first met Luo, who had spent almost a decade at Google and was part of the Safe Browsing team.
Google gave Khormaee firsthand experience in building phishing-detection technologies, a deep understanding of security from the company’s perspective, and how to develop and scale security businesses quickly, he told TechCrunch.
Before Google, Khormaee founded the sales intelligence platform Contastic, which was acquired by SugarCRM in 2016. He later served as VP of product management at Attentive for over a year and a half until November 2024, before starting AegisAI.
AegisAI has built reasoning agents, each of which is a custom-built LLM tuned to a specific threat. Once the orchestrating agent recognizes a threat or potential threat, it calls other agents in the network, which Khormaee refers to as “buddies.” These agents then run the analysis, reason with each other, and respond to the orchestrating agent with a verdict.
The agents perform real-time analysis of every message component, including links, attachments, metadata, QR codes, and behavioral patterns.
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