Ocean

Ocean is an AI-native email security startup that launched from stealth in May 2026 with $28 million in funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners and angel backing from Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport and Armis co-founders Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael. The company was founded in 2024 by Shay Shwartz and Oran Moyal.

Shwartz's background is notable: he made money as a teenage hacker, got caught at 16, then pivoted to cybersecurity defense — spending roughly a decade in Israel's elite defense and intelligence units (including work tied to the Iron Dome project) before leading projects at Axis, the startup later acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The thesis driving Ocean is that AI has democratized spear-phishing: techniques that previously required skilled human attackers can now be automated at scale, so the defense has to be agentic AI too.

The platform centers on an autonomous investigation engine called Ray, which evaluates every incoming email in real time. Ray analyzes sender information, message content, embedded links, technical infrastructure, and the organizational business context to determine trustworthiness — running a custom small language model rather than the rules-and-signatures approach that defined legacy email security. Ocean is already replacing legacy email security products in complex enterprise environments, reviewing billions of messages a month for customers including Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace.

Ocean is positioned in the "AI-versus-AI" pocket of cybersecurity: as foundation-model labs ship more powerful conversational AI, the same capabilities lower the cost of social-engineering attacks, and incumbents like Proofpoint, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, and Abnormal Security face structural pressure from a new generation of AI-native challengers. The Lightspeed round and the founder's defense-research lineage make Ocean one of the better-capitalized startups in that pocket.