AegisAI banks $36M as AI spear-phishing surges fivefold in a year
Email security startup AegisAI Inc. today said it has raised $36 million in new funding to counter a fast-growing class of artificial intelligence-generated email attacks that no amount of employee training can reliably stop.
The San Francisco company builds its own large language models to guard corporate inboxes. The pitch rests on how much the phishing lure has changed. An attacker used to need time and skill. Now AI does the legwork.
It scrapes the web for details about the target. It works out which colleague or vendor that person leans on. Then it drafts a note in that trusted voice, at scale. AegisAI calls the technique AI spear-phishing, and it says the capability now runs about the price of a cup of coffee.
The company runs a network of autonomous AI agents inside the inbox. Traditional filters look for patterns lifted from past scams. AegisAI’s agents read the intent and identity behind each message, an approach it says catches linguistically flawless attacks that clear every technical check. The company claims it cuts false positives by up to 90% against legacy tools.
