---
title: Spear Phishing Emails Are Getting Harder to Spot, and the Defense Is Now AI Too
description: AI-generated spear phishing emails now evade filters at nearly double the rate of human attacks. Inside the startups building AI-native email defense.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
updated: 2026-07-25T21:14:30.994Z
canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/spear-phishing-emails-are-getting-harder-to-spot-and-the-defense-is-now-ai-too
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/aegisai-cofounders-32541.webp
categories: Artificial Intelligence
content_type: News
region: United States
publication: Sovereign Magazine
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

Cyber-enabled crime cost Americans nearly $21 billion in 2025, according to [the FBI's Internet Crime Report](https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/cryptocurrency-and-ai-scams-bilk-americans-of-billions), and a growing share of it starts with a single, convincing email. The bureau's data shows business email compromise, attacks that exploit identity and trust rather than malware or a hacked system, dwarfs ransomware and other malicious-software losses combined. The reason, security researchers say, is that large language models have made the con easier to run: an attacker can now have an AI system study a target's public footprint and write a lure tailored to that person in seconds, at a scale no human fraud crew could match.

That shift is also drawing money into a new category of defense. AegisAI, an email security startup that builds its own LLMs to police the inbox, has raised a $36 million Series A led by Battery Ventures, with Accel and Foundation Capital returning as investors, bringing its total funding to $49 million less than a year after [leaving stealth](https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/google-s-defence-architects-launch-aegisai-ai-native-email-security-as-phishing-attacks-quadr). The round, [reported independently by TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/23/aegisai-founded-by-former-google-security-execs-lands-36m-to-stop-ai-driven-spear-phishing/), will fund a wider fleet of autonomous defense agents and push toward general availability for Vanguard, a companion tool that chases suspicious links and attachments outside the inbox.

AegisAI was founded in 2025 by chief executive Cy Khormaee and chief technology officer Ryan Luo, both veterans of Google's security group who worked on reCAPTCHA, Safe Browsing and Web Risk. Their pitch is that legacy filters, built to catch known malware signatures and blacklisted senders, are structurally unequipped for messages generated fresh by an AI model with no prior fingerprint.

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