Ocean announced its launch from stealth with $28 million in total funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. Additional angel investors include Assaf Rappaport, Wiz founders Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, along with Dor Knafo.
The company is introducing what it describes as the first AI-native email security platform built on autonomous investigation, designed to protect enterprises against increasingly sophisticated AI-powered email attacks. Ocean said its platform is already protecting hundreds of thousands of mailboxes while replacing traditional detection-based email security systems.
According to the company, email remains the primary entry point for enterprise cyberattacks, with more than 90% of successful attacks beginning with phishing attempts. Ocean believes advances in AI have enabled attackers to rapidly create highly personalized phishing campaigns at scale, making it more difficult for legacy detection systems to identify malicious activity.
Ocean’s platform is centered around an autonomous investigation engine called Ray, which evaluates every email in real time by analyzing sender information, message content, links, technical infrastructure, and business context to determine trustworthiness. The company said this allows enterprises to identify fraud, impersonation attempts, and targeted attacks that resemble legitimate communications while reducing the manual workload for security operations teams.
The company said it is already replacing legacy email security products in complex enterprise environments and counts customers including KAYAK, Kingston Technology, and Headspace.
Ocean was founded in 2024 by co-founders Shay Shwartz and Oran Moyal. The company is headquartered in New York City and Tel Aviv.
KEY QUOTES:
“The challenge is no longer just detecting malicious emails. It’s identifying harmful intent hidden inside messages that appear completely legitimate. Attackers now use AI to write flawlessly, reference real projects, and impersonate trusted colleagues, making it nearly impossible to spot the difference. Security teams end up spending too much time chasing outliers while the attacks that actually matter are designed to blend in. Ocean replaces surface-level filtering with AI agents that investigate every email, verify context, and identify malicious intent at scale.”
Shay Shwartz, CEO And Co-Founder, Ocean
“We look for companies that break the way a market has worked for years. Email security is at that point. The old model of flagging suspicious signals is no longer enough. Ocean replaces that with autonomous investigation, analyzing every email for context and intent instead of relying on detection. That’s a real shift in how this category operates.”
David Gussarsky, Lightspeed Venture
“AI broke email security and handed attackers an unfair advantage overnight. What drew us to this team is that they came from the offensive side. They know this world because they used to operate in it. Now they’re using AI to solve the problem once and for all.”
Mike Fey, GP At Picture Capital And CEO Of Island
