AegisAI, founded by former Google security execs, lands $36M to stop AI-driven spear phishing

Hackers are increasingly using AI to launch attacks on a massive scale, with email emerging as a primary target. AI can quickly aggregate personal information—such as information about coworkers, active projects, and recent travel itineraries—allowing bad actors to instantly craft convincing messages that look authentic.

Last year, former Google security executives Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, who previously worked on developing safe browsing technology and reCAPTCHA, teamed up to launch AegisAI, a startup that uses AI agents to stomp out these threats, known as spear phishing.

With a decade of experience preventing email hacks, the AegisAI co-founders realized that existing rule-based systems for preventing hacks—relying on “if-then” logic—are too slow and limited to catching AI-crafted malicious emails. So they developed AI agents that quickly analyze each message as a human would, paying attention to small anomalies that even the most elaborate checklist wouldn’t catch.