Accel and Foundation Capital lead seed round in AegisAI which offers the most accurate protection against phishing, malware, and social engineering attacks.
AegisAI, a cybersecurity startup founded by former Google Safe Browsing and reCAPTCHA leaders Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, announced its public launch and funding round with a radical approach to email security: autonomous AI agents that eliminate Phishing, Malware, and Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks before they reach user inboxes — while reducing false positives by up to 90% compared to traditional solutions.
The $13m seed funding round was led by Accel and Foundation Capital. The funding will accelerate product development, expand the engineering team, and support go-to-market efforts as the company scales its autonomous email security platform.
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AI has created a new wave of threats that rule-based systems are not prepared for. Adversaries can rotate graphics, messaging, and fabricate supporting content to create lures that look more real than ever. A 2024 study showed LLM-generated phishing messages had a significantly higher click-through rate (54%) than human-written ones (12%), proving their effectiveness.
Modern attackers are also increasingly abusing trusted platforms like Salesforce, Zoom or Google to deliver malicious content, exploiting the inherent trust these services carry to bypass traditional reputation-based security filters and rules that would typically block suspicious domains or unknown senders.
AegisAI autonomous AI agents eliminate Phishing, Malware, and Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks before they reach user inboxes.
AegisAI introduces a paradigm shift: an orchestrated network of real-time AI agents that inspect, analyze, and neutralize email threats autonomously, eliminating the need for static rules, extensive user training, or complex playbooks.
“We’ve spent almost a decade each protecting billions of users at Google, we’ve seen firsthand how enterprise email defenses are falling behind” said Cy Khormaee, co-founder and CEO at AegisAI. “We’re seeing the sophistication of AI powered attacks increase rapidly while existing email security defences are standing still. This leaves security leaders without the tools they need to defend their organizations.”
The AegisAI platform integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace via API deployment. Unlike traditional rule-based gateways, its AI agents continuously learn from real-world adversarial behavior and share threat intelligence across organizations, enabling rapid detection and remediation of emerging phishing, spoofing, and executive impersonation tactics.
“We don’t believe in creating more alerts — we believe in creating better security outcomes,” said Ryan Luo, CTO and Co-Founder of AegisAI. “Our mission is to protect organizations without adding operational burden and to give security teams the reliable intelligence they need to focus on what matters most.”
Core Platform Capabilities:
- Autonomous Threat Detection – Real-time analysis of every message component including links, attachments, metadata, QR codes and behavioral patterns.
- Intelligent False Positive Suppression – Customers in production environments have seen up to 90% reduction in False positives (good emails being quarantined) compared to traditional solutions.
- Zero-Configuration operation – Autonomous response, escalation, and policy enforcement requiring minimal SOC setup or maintenance.
- Security-First Design – Built with enterprise-grade encryption and data minimization principles.
AegisAI customer Bam Azizi, CEO at Mesh commented: “As a former security founder, I’ve seen the cat-and-mouse game play out for decades—especially in email security, where attackers constantly evolve to trick employees. Aegis is the first solution that truly changes the game. They came into Mesh and stopped attackers in their tracks. Our dashboard shows everything from fuzzing attempts to AI-generated spear phishing and BEC, and Aegis catches them all—without my team wasting time managing rules.” While Ian Cohen, CEO at Lokker said: “ We immediately saw threats to our accounting, engineering, and executives teams in the dashboard. Aegis enabled us to see and stop these threats without our team manually hunting them down.”
The founding team brings deep expertise from Google. Following a successful stealth phase with pilot customers across fintech and tech companies, AegisAI has demonstrated significant improvements in threat detection accuracy and operational efficiency.
Eric Wolford, Partner at Accel, added: “The AI era will inevitably drive disruption in email – the easiest attack vector. We were looking for a team that was AI-native – people who didn’t just whitewash with AI – people who had the DNA and career investments in the development of AI. Cy and Ryan were that right team. They are both AI-native and have spent an enormous amount of time in email security at Google”
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