AI-Native Security for the New Era of Email Threats: Our Investment in AegisAI
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Email is the top entry point for enterprise breaches, and its defenses are only getting worse. Traditional email security relies on static rules, domain reputation, and operator savvy. It’s a game that’s proving easier and easier for adversaries to defeat. AI makes exploiting trusted relationships and creating lures simple and effective. Recent CrowdStrike data shows LLM-authored phishing emails outperform human-authored ones by more than 4x.
Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo—former leaders at Google Safe Browsing and reCAPTCHA—founded cybersecurity startup AegisAI to close this gap. Their system deploys a network of autonomous AI agents that scrutinize every facet of an email and stop threats before they reach the inbox. Unlike rule-based filters, AegisAI’s agents continuously learn from and adapt to real-world attacks. Compared to legacy systems, they cut false positives by 90% and significantly reduce noise for security teams.
We were impressed by Cy and Ryan’s decades of combined experience shaping Google’s security architecture, as well as their understanding of the stakes at play in keeping enterprise email safe. Their deep expertise on security problems at the algorithmic level gives them the AI-native mindset to tackle this AI-native challenge.
AegisAI’s just coming out of stealth, but it’s already been successfully adopted by customers like Mesh, Stelliant, and Lokker. Their $13 million seed round, led by Accel alongside Foundation Capital, will help fund product development, grow the engineering team, and accelerate go-to-market efforts, all in support of Cy and Ryan’s broader ambition: to transform email from the weakest link in the enterprise tech stack to the most resilient.
Cy, Ryan, and the whole AegisAI team: welcome to the Accel family. We look forward to partnering with you on this critical mission.
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