AegisAI, founded by former Google security executives, lands 36 million dollars to stop AI driven spear phishing

AegisAI, founded by former Google security executives Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, raised a 36 million dollar Series A led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing investors Accel and Foundation Capital, according to the company's own announcement. The round brings AegisAI's total funding to 49 million dollars less than a year after the company emerged from stealth, reflecting fast growing investor interest in defending against a specific, rapidly worsening threat: AI generated spear phishing messages that are personalized enough to fool a meaningful share of recipients, unlike the more easily recognizable mass phishing attempts of years past. Khormaee and Luo previously spent roughly a decade at Google working on safe browsing technology and reCAPTCHA before founding AegisAI, and the company says its approach uses AI agents that analyze each incoming message roughly the way a careful human reviewer would, watching for small contextual anomalies that traditional rule based email security systems are typically too rigid and too slow to catch. Early customers already using AegisAI's technology include crypto payments company Mesh, AI startup LangChain, and privacy compliance platform Lokker, giving the company real production deployments to point to alongside its funding announcement. The round adds to a broader pattern of venture investment specifically targeting AI driven email and phishing threats this year, as attackers increasingly use the same generative AI capabilities being commercialized everywhere else to make older attack categories meaningfully more effective than they were even two years ago.