Ocean, an Agentic Email Security Startup, Wins Fortune Cyber 60 Five Months After Stealth

How the Cyber 60 selection works

The Cyber 60 is presented by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Amazon Web Services (AWS) in partnership with Fortune. Now in its fourth year, it honors companies across AI security, identity and access, data protection, cloud security, and security operations. Each of three categories, Early Stage, Early Growth, and Growth, includes 20 companies.

According to the announcement, Lightspeed evaluated more than 300 cybersecurity startups on annual recurring revenue, current- and prior-year growth, and business operations. Fortune then reviewed and validated the final list. Ocean was selected in the Early Stage category.

What Ocean says it does differently

Ocean points to a familiar problem: more than 90% of successful cyberattacks start with a phishing email, according to CISA, as cited by the company. Ocean argues that AI has changed what those emails look like. Attackers can now learn a business's baselines, relationships, and tone, so malicious messages look normal and slip past tools that were designed to hunt for patterns and anomalies.

The company's response is a platform that investigates every email, including those from known and trusted senders. Its approach has three layers:

• Proprietary AI models screen each message at machine speed.
• A swarm of purpose-built agents examines anything that warrants a closer look.
• Ray, Ocean's central intelligence engine, delivers the deepest analysis of communication intent, sender relationship history, and sending infrastructure.

Every verdict comes with a human-readable report of what was found and why. Ocean says this gives security teams evidence they can trust instead of a score they have to go verify.

Deployment and customers

Ocean says it deploys through API, read-only, with no MX change, and goes live in hours. In its company description, it also mentions a 60-day lookback that shows what has been slipping through existing defenses.

Customers include Kayak, Headspace, and Global Fortune 500 organizations across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and more. According to the company, Ocean processes more than one billion emails every month and protects hundreds of thousands of employee mailboxes globally.

Comments from the company and Lightspeed

Shay Shwartz, Co-Founder and CEO of Ocean, said: "Being named to the Cyber 60 is a credit to the people building Ocean and to the customers who trusted us early."

David Gussarsky, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said: "Recent events show us that security needs to move at machine speed. Ocean is leading that shift in communications security, protecting some of the largest organizations with an agentic solution that responds to new attacks in seconds."

What it means for security teams

The recognition places Ocean among a group of venture-backed security firms judged on revenue, growth, and operations, rather than on technology claims alone. For security teams, the company's pitch centers on inspecting all email, including from trusted senders, and on explainable verdicts. The performance claims in the announcement come from Ocean and Lightspeed, and the source does not include independent test results.