AegisAI, an email security company building its own large language models to defend the inbox, announced a $36 million Series A led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing investors Accel and Foundation Capital. The round brings the company’s total funding to $49 million, less than a year after emerging from stealth. AegisAI will use the funding to scale its fleet of autonomous defense agents, accelerate general availability of Vanguard, its agent that hunts threats beyond the inbox, and expand enterprise go-to-market efforts.
The company’s platform uses language models and an orchestrated network of AI agents to evaluate the intent behind suspicious emails in real time, rather than relying on pattern matching against known scams. AegisAI’s State of the AI Threat in Email study, presented at the 2026 M3AAWG conference and based on analysis of more than 20,000 phishing, scam, and malware emails, found that AI-generated spear phishing grew from 2.8 percent to 13.9 percent of all observed phishing in a single year, that AI-generated emails evade traditional filters at nearly double the rate of human-written attacks, and that 72.6 percent of successful AI attacks passed email authentication after being sent from compromised legitimate accounts. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report found reported cybercrime losses reached a record $20.8 billion last year, with business email compromise accounting for $11.64 billion in losses compared with less than $52 million for ransomware and malware combined.
AegisAI was founded in 2025 by CEO Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, both veterans of Google’s security group who helped build reCAPTCHA, Safe Browsing, and Web Risk. Since its public launch in September 2025, the company has deployed with customers including crypto payments company Mesh, AI company LangChain, and Lokker, where AegisAI caught an attack originating through compromised Salesforce infrastructure.
KEY QUOTES:
“The most immediate, catastrophic risk to your organization isn’t an AI agent hacking your firewall. It’s an AI model manipulating someone in your organization into handing over the keys, often through the most trusted, most vulnerable contact of the person it’s targeting. You cannot patch human trust. When the attack is AI, the defense has to be AI.”
Cy Khormaee, Co-founder and CEO, AegisAI
“Email is where enterprise trust lives and generative AI just broke every assumption legacy email security was built on. When attacks are machine-generated, personalized and indistinguishable from legitimate mail, the only viable defense is an equally capable AI operating at machine speed.”
Dharmesh Thakker, General Partner, Battery Ventures
