Ocean Raises $28M in Total Funding Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners

The round also saw participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners, as well as angel investors Assaf Rappaport (Wiz), Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael (Armis), and Dor Knafo (former CEO of Axis Security and General Partner at Cyberstarts), among others. 

Ocean has built an AI-powered email security platform that automatically detects, investigates, and stops advanced cyberattacks. It protects hundreds of thousands of email accounts and provides a modern alternative to legacy security tools that are less effective against today’s AI-driven threats.

Ocean is launching an AI-native email security platform built on autonomous investigation. It already protects hundreds of thousands of mailboxes and replaces older detection-based tools that are no longer effective against modern AI-powered cyberattacks.

Email remains the primary entry point for enterprise attacks, with over 90% of successful breaches starting with phishing. Spear phishing used to require significant time and manual effort, but AI now allows highly personalized attacks to be created in seconds and sent at scale. This has made it harder for traditional security systems to detect threats using older pattern-based methods.

Ocean is already replacing legacy email security tools in large enterprise environments, helping protect Global Fortune 500 companies and their customers, including KAYAK, Kingston Technology, and Headspace.

At the core of the platform is Ray, Ocean’s autonomous investigation engine, which analyzes every email in real-time. It evaluates the sender, content, links, technical signals and business context to determine whether a message is safe. This helps prevent fraud, impersonation and targeted attacks that can appear to be normal communication. By automating investigation, and response, Ocean reduces manual work for security teams and enables faster threat detection, and response.

Read More:Commure Raises $70M in Funding Led by General Catalyst

"Shay Shwartz, CEO, and co founder of Ocean, said the challenge today is not just detecting malicious email's but identifying harmful intent hidden in messages that look completely legitimate. He explained that attackers now use artificial intelligence AI to write realistic emails, reference real projects and impersonate trusted colleagues, making threats harder to spot. At the same time, security team's spend too much time chasing false alerts. Ocean addresses this by replacing basic filtering with artificial intelligence AI agents that analyze every email in real time, understand context and detect malicious intent at scale."

“We look for companies that break the way a market has worked for years,” said David Gussarsky of Lightspeed Venture. “Email security is at that point. The old model of flagging suspicious signals is no longer enough. Ocean replaces that with autonomous investigation, analyzing every email for context, and intent rather than relying on detection. Thats a real shift in how this category operates.”

“AI broke email security and handed attackers an unfair advantage overnight,” said Mike Fey, GP at Picture Capital and CEO of Island. “What drew us to this team is that they came from the offensive side. They know this world because they used to operate in it. Now they're using AI to solve the problem once and for all.”

About Ocean

Founded in 2024, by Shay Shwartz, and Oran Moyal, Ocean is an agentic email security platform designed to defend against AI powered cyberattacks. It uses a network of AI agents to analyze every email in real time, checking behavior, validating intent, and detecting hidden threat's that traditional security tools often miss.

In its first year, Ocean has scanned over one billion emails and now processes more than one billion emails each month, while protecting hundreds of thousands of employee mailboxes worldwide. Former nation-state operators and AI researchers lead the company.

Read More:Century Health Raises $5M in Seed Funding Led by Origin Ventures