Shay Shwartz possesses extensive expertise in email phishing attacks. His journey began in his teenage years, where he leveraged his hacking skills for financial gain. However, after being apprehended at age 16, he underwent a pivotal realization: his cyber talents could be redirected towards preventing malicious attacks rather than initiating them.
This led him to dedicate approximately a decade to high-level cybersecurity roles. During this period, he spearheaded critical projects for Israel’s elite defense and intelligence units, notably contributing to initiatives like the Iron Dome project. Subsequently, he joined Axis, a startup that was later acquired by HPE.
Throughout his distinguished career, Shwartz harbored a strong ambition to establish his own startup. Two years ago, he finally realized this long-held aspiration.
His new venture, Ocean, an agentic email security platform specifically engineered to combat AI-powered cyberattacks, has recently emerged from stealth mode. The company announced a total funding of $28 million, with the round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and additional participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. The investment also attracted several prominent angel investors, including Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, alongside Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, co-founders of Armis, a company recently acquired by ServiceNow for $7.75 billion.
While established providers such as Proofpoint and Mimecast, alongside newer entrants like Abnormal Security, are adept at detecting conventional phishing attempts, Shwartz contends that the rise of AI necessitates a fundamentally different defensive strategy.
Historically, executing a sophisticated spear-phishing attack demanded considerable time, meticulous research, and extensive manual effort, making it a feat achievable only by highly skilled hackers.
“AI just made the entire process automatic, so the scale is much, much bigger now,” Shwartz explained to TechCrunch. He further elaborated, “I can instruct LLM to go and understand exactly who you are, harvest large amount of public information, and create those phishing attacks very targeted against you.”
Ocean asserts that its advanced AI technology is capable of comprehensively analyzing the context of every inbound email to accurately identify instances of fraud and impersonation.
The startup is already processing billions of emails monthly for a growing roster of clients, including industry leaders such as Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace.
Shwartz detailed that Ocean developed a specialized small language model, precisely tuned to rapidly analyze emails, decipher the sender’s true intent, and evaluate it against the recipient’s specific organizational context.
“This is like having a guard in every door,” Shwartz remarked, emphasizing the pervasive protection. “This is how we make the inbox a safe place with high hygiene.”
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