Ocean raises $28 million to fight AI powered email phishing

In short: Ocean, an email security startup, has raised $28 million to help companies catch phishing emails that are written with AI.

What happened

Ocean, a company focused on email security, has come out of “stealth mode,” meaning it has been working quietly before publicly sharing what it is building. The company says it is designed to stop AI powered phishing, which is when scammers use AI tools to write convincing emails that trick people into clicking a link or sharing passwords.

Ocean’s funding totals $28 million. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. TechCrunch also reports that angel investors joined, including Assaf Rappaport of Wiz, and Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael of Armis.

The company was founded by Shay Shwartz, who previously worked in cybersecurity roles connected to Israel’s defense and intelligence units, including work linked to the Iron Dome project. Ocean’s co-founder and CTO is Oran Moyal.

Ocean says it reviews billions of emails each month for customers including Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace. It says it uses a “small language model,” which is a smaller version of the kind of AI used in chatbots, tuned to quickly judge whether an email seems like fraud or impersonation.

Why it matters

Phishing emails used to be easier to spot because they often looked sloppy. Ocean’s founder argues that AI makes targeted scam emails faster and cheaper to create, like giving a scammer a writing assistant that never gets tired. If tools like Ocean work as claimed, they could reduce the chances that one convincing email leads to stolen money or account takeovers.

Source: TechCrunch AI