From young hacker to cybersecurity founder: Ocean raises $28 million in funding

Although Shay Shwartz engaged in hacking in his youth, after being caught at 16, he decided to channel his talent into preventing attacks rather than executing them. For ten years, he served in Israel's elite defense and intelligence units, including key roles in the Iron Dome project. After working at Axis, a company later acquired by HPE, he finally launched his own startup, Ocean. As reported by Techcrunch.com reports.

Ocean is an agentic email security platform that combats AI-powered phishing attacks. The company emerged from stealth mode, announcing it has raised $28 million from investors led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Founders of major companies like Wiz and Armis also invested in the project.

Shwartz notes that AI has automated phishing attacks, drastically increasing their scale. Today, LLM technologies make it easy to create highly personalized, precise, and convincing phishing messages for every individual. Traditional solutions like Proofpoint or Mimecast may struggle to detect such sophisticated attacks.

The Ocean platform deeply analyzes the context of every incoming email to detect fraud and impersonation attempts. The startup is already scanning billions of emails monthly for clients such as Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace. Ocean utilizes a specialized small language model for this purpose.