AegisAI raises $36 million to fight AI-written phishing emails

AegisAI has raised a $36 million Series A to build email-security tools for the age of AI-written spear phishing. TechCrunch reports that Battery Ventures led the round, bringing the startup’s total funding to $49 million.

The company was founded by former Google security executives Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, who worked on safe browsing technology and reCAPTCHA. Their argument is that older rule-based defenses move too slowly when attackers can use AI to gather personal context and craft convincing emails at scale.

AegisAI uses AI agents to inspect messages more like a human reviewer would, looking for small inconsistencies and suspicious context rather than only matching fixed rules. The company says customers already include Mash, LangChain, and Google-owned Lokker.

The pitch fits a fast-changing threat model: phishing emails no longer need to be generic or poorly written. The hard test will be whether AegisAI can reduce misses without burying workers in false alarms, especially as attackers adopt the same AI techniques to adapt.