From teen hacker to Iron Dome researcher, founder raises $28M to fight AI phishing
▼ Summary
– Shay Shwartz, a former teenage hacker, now leads Ocean, an email security startup that emerged from stealth with $28 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others.
– Ocean is an agentic email security platform designed to combat AI-powered phishing attacks, which Shwartz says are now automated and scalable due to large language models.
– The startup claims its AI analyzes email context to detect fraud, using a small language model tailored to understand sender intent and organizational context.
– Ocean already reviews billions of emails monthly for customers including Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace.
– Shwartz previously spent a decade in top cybersecurity roles for Israel’s defense and intelligence units, including work on the Iron Dome project.
A teenage hacker turned cybersecurity specialist, Shay Shwartz now leads a startup that just raised $28 million to combat the rising threat of AI-powered phishing attacks. His journey from a young cybercriminal to a researcher contributing to Israel’s Iron Dome project has culminated in the launch of Ocean, an agentic email security platform that emerged from stealth mode with significant backing.
At 16, Shwartz was caught hacking for profit. That turning point redirected his talents toward defense. Over the next decade, he held top-tier cybersecurity roles, including leading major projects for Israel’s elite defense and intelligence units. His work even intersected with the Iron Dome missile defense system. Later, he joined Axis, a startup later acquired by HPE. But the urge to build his own company never faded. Two years ago, he finally acted.
Ocean’s funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. The investor list also includes high-profile angels such as Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, and Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, co-founders of Armis, which recently sold to ServiceNow for $7.75 billion.
Traditional email security vendors like Proofpoint and Mimecast, along with newer players such as Abnormal Security, are effective against standard phishing. But Shwartz argues that AI demands a fundamentally different approach. In the past, spear-phishing required significant time, research, and manual effort, limiting it to highly sophisticated hackers.
“AI just made the entire process automatic, so the scale is much, much bigger now,” Shwartz told TechCrunch. “I can instruct 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. The startup is already reviewing billions of emails each month for customers including Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace. To achieve this, 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 in every door,” Shwartz said. “This is how we make the inbox a safe place with high hygiene.”
(Source: TechCrunch)