AegisAI banks $36M as AI spear phishing surges fivefold in a year

Email security startup AegisAI Inc. has raised $36 million in Series A funding led by Battery Ventures LP to counter a surge in AI-generated spear phishing, which the company says made up 13.9% of phishing attacks observed by the end of 2025, up from 2.8% early in the year. The company builds its own large language models to detect intent and identity in emails, claiming it cuts false positives by up to 90% against legacy tools. CEO Cy Khormaee said, "When the attack is AI, the defense has to be AI.

AegisAI banks $36M as AI spear phishing surges fivefold in a year Email security startup AegisAI Inc. https://www.aegisai.ai/ today said it has raised $36 million in new funding to counter a fast-growing class of artificial intelligence-generated email attacks that no amount of employee training can reliably stop. The San Francisco company builds its own large language models to guard corporate inboxes. The pitch rests on how much the phishing lure has changed. An attacker used to need time and skill. Now AI does the legwork. It scrapes the web for details about the target. It works out which colleague or vendor that person leans on. Then it drafts a note in that trusted voice, at scale. AegisAI calls the technique AI spear phishing, and it says the capability now runs about the price of a cup of coffee. The company runs a network of autonomous AI agents inside the inbox. Traditional filters look for patterns lifted from past scams. AegisAI’s agents read the intent and identity behind each message, an approach it says catches linguistically flawless attacks that clear every technical check. The company claims it cuts false positives by up to 90% against legacy tools. AI-generated spear phishing made up 2.8% of the phishing AegisAI observed in early 2025 and reached 13.9% by the end of the year. That finding comes from a study https://www.aegisai.ai/state-of-the-ai-threat-in-email the company presented at this year’s M3AAWG conference, drawn from a pool of more than 20,000 malicious emails. The AI notes were also harder to stop. They reached the inbox at close to twice the rate of human-written attacks. Of the ones that got through, almost 73% had cleared email authentication, sent from real accounts that attackers had quietly taken over. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s latest Internet Crime Report https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025 IC3Report.pdf lands in the same place. Victims reported a record $20.8 billion in losses last year. Business email compromise, which turns on identity rather than malware, made up $11.64 billion of that. Ransomware and malicious software combined did not come close. “The most immediate, catastrophic risk to your organization isn’t an AI agent hacking your firewall. It’s an AI model manipulating someone in your organization into handing over the keys,” said Cy Khormaee, co-founder and chief executive of AegisAI. “You cannot patch human trust. When the attack is AI, the defense has to be AI.” Khormaee started the company in 2025 with Ryan Luo. The two spent years in Google LLC’s core security group, where they helped build reCAPTCHA, Safe Browsing and Web Risk. AegisAI launched publicly in September https://siliconangle.com/2025/09/11/aegisai-raises-13m-protect-business-users-email-attacks/ and has since signed dozens of customers across fintech and technology, including crypto payments company Mesh Connect Inc. and AI developer platform LangChain Inc.. At web privacy company firm Lokker, it says its agents caught an attack routed through a vendor’s compromised Salesforce Inc. systems, a message that carried no malicious link or attachment. The new money will scale AegisAI’s roster of defense agents and push toward general availability for Vanguard, the company’s threat-hunting agent that works outside the inbox. Introduced in March, Vanguard follows suspicious links and attachments onto the open web and returns a threat report within minutes Battery Ventures LP led the Series A round, with existing backers Accel Partners LP and Foundation Capital joining. Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures, said generative AI “just broke every assumption legacy email security was built on,” leaving a machine-speed defense as the only viable answer. The financing brings AegisAI’s total raised to $49 million, less than a year after its public launch. Image: AegisAI A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE: Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network , where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities. 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos , powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network. Are you AWS customer? Support SiliconANGLE Financially by buying your AWS services from our Marketplace portal page and links. 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