AegisAI Raises $49M to Catch AI-Crafted Phishing Emails
AegisAI, founded in 2025, has closed a $36 million Series A led by Battery Ventures. Accel and Foundation Capital also participated. Total raised to date: $49 million.
The company was started by Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, both former Google security engineers. Their prior work includes Gmail safe browsing and reCAPTCHA.
The Problem They're Selling Against
AI-generated phishing emails bypass existing email security controls more than 50% of the time. AegisAI describes AI-crafted attacks as nearly twice as effective as pre-AI phishing attempts.
Those numbers are from AegisAI, so take them with appropriate salt. But the general trend is well-documented: LLMs write convincing, targeted emails at scale, and rule-based filters weren't built for that.
What AegisAI Actually Does
AegisAI deploys AI agents to analyze inbound email for spear phishing threats. The agents can flag malicious PDF attachments that include built-in passwords or CAPTCHAs, two techniques commonly used to evade standard spam filters.
Current customers include LangChain, crypto payments company Mesh, and privacy platform Lokker.
The Structural Bet
The pitch is straightforward: the attackers are using AI, so the defenders need AI. Khormaee and Luo spent years building the detection infrastructure that protected Gmail at scale. AegisAI is applying that background to a narrower, higher-stakes target.
Whether agent-based email analysis actually outperforms existing enterprise solutions at the price points businesses will pay is the question $49 million is now funding.
Source: Techcrunch