AegisAI, a cybersecurity startup founded last year by former Google security executives Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, has secured a $36 million Series A funding round led by Battery Ventures. Existing backers Accel and Foundation Capital also participated, bringing the company’s total raised capital to $49 million. The investment arrives as AI-driven spear phishing attacks grow increasingly sophisticated, with machine learning enabling threat actors to rapidly aggregate personal and corporate data to craft highly personalized, convincing email campaigns. Recognizing that traditional rule-based email security systems rely on slow, predefined logic that frequently fails against modern threats, Khormaee and Luo developed an agentic defense platform. Their technology evaluates incoming messages in real time, mimicking human analytical patterns to detect subtle anomalies and contextual fraud that static checklists miss. The startup reports that AI-powered attacks now bypass conventional email controls more than half the time, underscoring the urgency of its solution. AegisAI’s system has already been deployed by dozens of organizations, including crypto payment firm Mash, AI development platform LangChain, and Google-owned compliance tool Lokker. Notably, the platform can identify deceptive elements such as password-protected PDFs and embedded CAPTCHAs designed to bypass legacy spam filters. The funding round reflects a broader industry shift toward AI-native security architectures. Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures, emphasized that the rapid escalation of AI-assisted email attacks has made intelligent, automated defense a top corporate priority. While AegisAI initially focuses on email security, Thakker noted that the founders’ pedigree in securing Gmail gives the company a distinct advantage in capturing market share from entrenched providers like Proofpoint and Mimecast, as well as newer entrants like Ocean and Abnormal Security. Beyond immediate email protection, AegisAI plans to leverage its agentic framework to address wider data security challenges. Khormaee stated that the company’s long-term objective is to build customized, highly advanced investigative agents capable of operating across multiple defense vectors. By replacing outdated, signature-based defenses with dynamic, context-aware AI, AegisAI aims to establish a new standard for enterprise threat mitigation as cybercriminals continue to weaponize machine learning at scale.