Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo have raised a $36 million Series A for AegisAI, giving the former Google security executives substantially more capital to turn their AI-agent email defense into a broader security platform. TechCrunch reported on July 23 that Battery Ventures led the round, with existing investors Accel and Foundation Capital participating.
The financing brings AegisAI's total funding to $49 million following a $13 million seed round announced in September 2025. AegisAI has not disclosed its valuation, revenue, pricing or annual recurring revenue. AegisAI says it has signed dozens of customers, including Mash, LangChain and Lokker, less than a year after launching.
The pace of the fundraising reflects the founders' credentials and the urgency enterprise security buyers now attach to AI-assisted phishing. Khormaee led product work for Safe Browsing, reCAPTCHA and Web Risk during more than five years at Google. Before Google, he founded Contastic, an NLP product whose intellectual property and assets SugarCRM acquired on March 3, 2016. He later served as a product executive at Attentive before leaving in November 2024.
Luo spent almost a decade at Google. AegisAI says he modernized the core Safe Browsing phishing platform and worked on reCAPTCHA's adoption. When Luo announced his departure from Google in 2025, he wrote that AI was allowing phishing attacks to scale across languages, industries and organization sizes. That experience gave AegisAI an unusually direct founder-market fit: Khormaee and Luo had already worked on systems designed to identify malicious links and automated abuse across billions of users.
From an investor thesis to a working product
AegisAI emerged from a deliberate incubation process rather than a chance product experiment. Foundation Capital partner Sid Trivedi wrote that he discussed the concept with Khormaee in late November 2024 after conducting more than 30 customer calls about email security. Trivedi then arranged meetings with security executives while Khormaee and Luo developed an initial prototype.
That history explains AegisAI's fast capital cycle. Accel and Foundation Capital co-led the seed after working with the founders during AegisAI's formation. Battery Ventures led the Series A after the product reached early deployments.
The investor case depends on a structural change in phishing economics. Generative AI lets attackers collect public information about an employee, imitate the tone of a colleague or vendor and produce individualized messages without the time previously required for manual research. A May 2026 Barracuda analysis found that AI-driven social engineering and packaged phishing services were increasing the scale and success of email attacks. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded more than one million complaints and nearly $21 billion in reported cyber-enabled losses, with phishing and spoofing among the most frequently reported categories.
A network of specialized email agents
AegisAI's product connects to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 through APIs, avoiding the mail-routing changes required by traditional secure email gateways. AegisAI says deployment can happen in minutes.
Once connected, AegisAI runs incoming messages through a network of specialized agents. The agents inspect links, attachments, sender metadata, QR codes, language, intent and behavioral patterns. An orchestrating agent can call other agents trained around particular threat types before deciding whether to quarantine a message.
The architecture is designed to examine context that fixed signatures and reputation lists may miss. AegisAI says its agents can reason across links, files, sender behavior and message intent, then explain why a message was flagged.
AegisAI also claims its product cuts false positives by roughly 90%. That figure comes from AegisAI and its investors and has not been independently benchmarked. Precision is a central commercial issue in email security: a system that blocks legitimate invoices, customer messages or internal documents creates its own operational cost.
The market is already crowded
Khormaee and Luo are competing with established vendors including Proofpoint and Mimecast, along with newer API-based providers such as Abnormal AI, Sublime Security and Ocean. Many of those vendors are making a similar argument that behavioral models and AI agents can respond to threats faster than manually maintained rules.
Capital and acquisitions have followed. Sublime Security raised a $150 million Series C in October 2025 to expand its agent-based email security products. Varonis acquired SlashNext in September 2025, adding phishing and social-engineering detection to its data security platform. In March 2026, Abnormal AI launched Attune 1.0, a behavioral foundation model spanning identity, context and message content.
AegisAI's Google pedigree helps open doors, but sustained differentiation will depend on detection quality, false-positive rates and deployment across much larger organizations. Its current customer count remains self-reported, and AegisAI has not published retention or revenue figures that show how those deployments translate into a durable business.
Khormaee is already framing email as the first application for AegisAI's agent architecture. He told TechCrunch that customized agents capable of conducting investigations could eventually move into areas such as data security. That expansion would place AegisAI in competition with much larger security platforms, while also increasing the market available to the founders if their investigation model transfers beyond the inbox.
The Series A gives Khormaee and Luo the resources to test that thesis. AegisAI has moved from an investor-incubated prototype to dozens of reported customers and $49 million in capital in roughly a year. Its next task is proving that the same agents can preserve accuracy as customer environments, attack patterns and message volumes become harder to manage.