Ocean raises GBP £28 million to fight AI email fraud

Ocean has emerged from stealth with USD $28 million in funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and says it is already deployed in large corporate environments.

The round also included Picture Capital and Cerca Partners, as well as angel investors Assaf Rappaport of Wiz; Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael of Armis; and Dor Knafo, former Chief Executive Officer of Axis Security and now a General Partner at Cyberstarts.

Ocean is entering a crowded but important segment of the cyber market as companies face rising phishing, impersonation and fraud attempts delivered through email. The company argues that advances in generative AI have made these attacks harder to detect because they mimic normal business communications instead of triggering traditional warning signs.

Threat context

The company was founded by Shay Shwartz and Oran Moyal, who met as teenagers in Israel's Magshimim cybersecurity programme and later held senior roles at Microsoft, Axis Security and VisibleRisk. It is based in New York and Tel Aviv.

Its system investigates emails in context rather than relying on conventional methods built around rules, signals or known indicators. Ocean's core engine, Ray, reviews sender information, message content, links, technical infrastructure and business context in real time to assess whether an email can be trusted.

Ocean says it now processes more than one billion emails each month and protects more than 170,000 mailboxes globally. Named customers include Kayak, Kingston Technology and Headspace, along with other Fortune 500 organisations.

Email remains one of the main routes into corporate networks, and Ocean is pitching its product to security teams that still spend significant time manually examining suspicious messages. Its argument is that many of the most effective attacks no longer look unusual enough for older tools to catch consistently.

Shay Shwartz, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Ocean, described the shift in the threat landscape in direct terms.

"The challenge is no longer just detecting malicious emails. It's identifying harmful intent hidden inside messages that appear completely legitimate," said Shay Shwartz, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Ocean.

"Attackers now use AI to write flawlessly, reference real projects, and impersonate trusted colleagues, making it nearly impossible to spot the difference. Security teams end up spending too much time chasing outliers while the attacks that actually matter are designed to blend in. Ocean replaces surface-level filtering with AI agents that investigate every email, verify context, and identify malicious intent at scale," added Shwartz.

Investor view

Investors backing the round framed Ocean as a response to a structural shift in email threats rather than an incremental update to existing products.

"We look for companies that break the way a market has worked for years," said David Gussarsky of Lightspeed Venture Partners.

"Email security is at that point. The old model of flagging suspicious signals is no longer enough. Ocean replaces that with autonomous investigation, analyzing every email for context and intent instead of relying on detection. That's a real shift in how this category operates," added Gussarsky.

Mike Fey of Picture Capital also pointed to the impact of AI on attack methods and the founders' background.

"AI broke email security and handed attackers an unfair advantage overnight," said Mike Fey of Picture Capital.

"What drew us to this team is that they came from the offensive side. They know this world because they used to operate in it. Now they're using AI to solve the problem once and for all," added Fey.

Email scale

Founded in 2024, Ocean says it scanned more than one billion emails in its first year. Its launch comes as businesses reassess long-established cyber defences designed to spot anomalies, suspicious wording or abnormal sender behaviour, even as newer attacks are built to resemble routine internal and external correspondence.

Ray examines every email in real time and is designed to help companies stop fraud, impersonation and targeted attacks that resemble ordinary communication. Ocean says this approach reduces the manual burden on security operations teams and improves response times by automating investigation and response.

For now, the company's early traction, customer list and funding suggest investors see room for a new approach in a mature security category. Ocean says it is already replacing older email security tools in complex enterprise environments while processing more than one billion emails a month.