From teen hacker to Iron Dome researcher, this founder raised $28M to fight AI phishing

Shay Shwartz knows a lot about email phishing attacks. As a teenager he made money as a hacker, but after he was caught at the age of 16, he realized he could use his cyber talents to prevent attacks instead of launching them.

He then held top positions in cybersecurity for about a decade, leading major projects for Israel’s elite defense and intelligence units, including work related to the Iron Dome project, before joining Axis, the startup later acquired by HPE.

All along, he was eager to launch his own startup, and two years ago he finally took the plunge.

His startup Ocean, an agentic email security platform built to combat AI-powered attacks, just emerged from stealth mode with $28 million in total funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. High-profile angel investors also participated in the round, including Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, as well as Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, the co-founders of Armis, which recently sold to ServiceNow for $7.75 billion.

While established vendors like Proofpoint and Mimecast, along with newer players like Abnormal Security, help detect standard phishing attacks, Shwartz (right next to co-founder and CTO Oran Moyal) argues that AI requires a different defensive approach.

In the past, only very sophisticated hackers could perform spear phishing due to the enormous amount of time, research and manual labor required to conduct targeted attacks.

“AI has just made the whole process automatic, so the scale is now much, much greater,” Shwartz told TechCrunch. “I can direct LLM to understand exactly who you are, collect a large amount of public information, and create phishing attacks that are highly targeted against you.”

Ocean claims its AI can thoroughly analyze the context of each incoming email to detect fraud and impersonation attempts.

The startup already reviews billions of emails every month for clients like Kayak, Kingston Technology and Headspace.

Shwartz said Ocean has built a small language model tailored to quickly analyzing emails, understanding the sender’s intent and evaluating them in the user’s specific organizational context.

“This is like having a guard at every door,” Shwartz said. “In this way we turn the inbox into a safe place with high hygiene.”