From teenage hacker to Iron Dome explorer, this startup raised $28M to fight AI fraud

Shay Shwartz knows a lot about phishing emails. As a teenager, he made money as a hacker, but when he was caught at age 16, he realized he could use his cyber skills to prevent attacks rather than start them.

He spent almost ten years in high-level positions in cybersecurity, leading the main projects of Israel’s advanced security and intelligence units, including the work related to the Iron Dome project, before joining Axis, a start-up that was acquired by HPE.

All this time, he had been wanting to start his own business, and two years ago, he took action.

His startup Ocean, an email security platform built to combat AI-driven threats, just came out of the blue with a total of $28 million in funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. Top angel investors also joined the round, including Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, as well as Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, co-founders of Armis, which recently sold to ServiceNow for $7.75 billion.

While established vendors like Proofpoint and Mimecast, along with newer players like Abnormal Security, help identify fraud threats, Shwartz (pictured next to co-founder CTO Oran Moyal) says AI requires a different defense approach.

In the past, only the most sophisticated hackers were able to cover up fraud due to the amount of time, research, and manual work required to launch the attacks they wanted.

“AI has just made this process more automated, so the scope is huge,” Shwartz told TechCrunch. “I would advise LLM to go out and understand who you are, harvest public information, and create fraud threats that target you.”

Ocean says its AI can better analyze incoming e-mails to detect scams and attempts.

The startup already scans billions of emails every month for clients, including Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace.

Shwartz said Ocean created a small language that is designed to quickly analyze emails, understand the sender’s intent, and evaluate them based on their performance.

“This is like having a security guard at every door,” Shwartz said. “This is how we make inboxes a safe and clean place.”