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

Shay Schwartz knows a lot about email phishing attacks. As a teenager, he made money as a hacker, but after he was arrested at 16, he realized he could use his cyber talents to prevent attacks rather than launch them.

He went on to spend about a decade in high-level positions in cybersecurity, leading major projects for Israel’s elite defense and intelligence units, including work related to the Iron Dome project, before joining Axis, a startup that was later acquired by HPE.

All along, he had been itching to launch his own startup, and two years ago, he finally made the decision.

His startup Ocean, an email security proxy platform designed to fight AI-driven attacks, just came out of stealth mode with a total funding of $28 million. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. High-profile angel investors also joined the round, including Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, as well as Yevgeny Dibrov and Nader Israel, 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, Schwartz (pictured next to co-founder and CTO Oran Moyal) says AI requires a different defensive approach.

In the past, only sophisticated hackers could perform phishing scams due to the enormous amount of time, research, and manual work required to launch targeted attacks.

“AI has automated the whole process, so the scope is much greater now,” Schwartz told TechCrunch. “I can have LLM go in and figure out exactly who you are, collect a large amount of public information, and create phishing attacks that are very targeted at you.”

Ocean claims that its AI can precisely analyze the context of every incoming email to detect fraud and impersonation attempts.

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

Ocean has built a small language model designed to quickly analyze emails, understand the sender’s intent, and evaluate it in light of the user’s specific organizational context, Schwartz said.

“It’s like having a guard at every door,” Schwartz said. “This is how we make your inbox a safe, clean place.”