Ocean lands Fortune Cyber 60 nod for email security

Ocean has been named a winner in the Early Stage category of the Fortune Cyber 60, a list of venture-backed cybersecurity companies selected by Lightspeed Venture Partners and validated by Fortune.

The recognition comes five months after the email security company emerged from stealth. More than 300 cybersecurity startups were assessed on annual recurring revenue, growth and business operations before 60 companies were chosen across three stages of development.

Ocean focuses on email-based threats at a time when phishing remains a leading entry point for cyberattacks. The company cited US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency data showing that more than 90% of successful cyberattacks begin with a phishing email.

Its platform examines every email, including messages from known or trusted senders, as companies face attacks designed to mimic routine business communications. Ocean says its system analyses communication intent, sender relationship history and sending infrastructure, then provides security teams with a written report explaining each decision.

The platform is deployed through an API in read-only mode, without requiring an MX change, and can be activated within hours.

Customers include Kayak, Headspace and unnamed Fortune 500 organisations in financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and retail. Ocean says it processes more than one billion emails each month and protects hundreds of thousands of employee mailboxes worldwide.

Selection process

Now in its fourth year, the Cyber 60 covers areas including AI security, identity and access, data protection, cloud security and security operations. The list is divided into Early Stage, Early Growth and Growth, with 20 companies in each category.

Lightspeed evaluated the field and Fortune reviewed and validated the final list, according to the organisers. That places Ocean among younger cybersecurity companies that have already shown commercial traction and operational progress.

The award gives Ocean a prominent industry endorsement at an early stage in its public life. The company only recently began operating openly, after several years of development before emerging from stealth.

Email threat shift

Ocean argues that AI has changed phishing by making fraudulent messages harder to distinguish from ordinary correspondence. Instead of relying on crude impersonation, attackers can study a company's patterns, relationships and tone to make messages appear routine.

That trend has increased pressure on security vendors whose detection systems rely on anomalies or known malicious indicators. Ocean's approach is to inspect messages that appear normal on the surface and assess them against a broader set of contextual signals.

The company says its system uses proprietary AI models to review each message at machine speed before escalating suspicious items for further analysis by specialised agents. Ray, which Ocean describes as its central intelligence engine, then produces the final analysis.

Shay Shwartz, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer 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. We're proud to help the world protect its communications from social engineering in today's hyper-realistic environment, where everything seems normal and trustworthy."

The recognition also reflects investor interest in communications security tools, an area that has become more exposed as generative AI changes both attack methods and user expectations. Startups in the sector are under pressure not only to show technical accuracy but also to prove they can fit into corporate systems without disrupting email operations.

Ocean says its product can be added without changing mail routing, reducing friction for large organisations testing a new security layer. It also says a 60-day lookback can reveal what previously passed through existing defences.

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 organisations with an agentic solution that responds to new attacks in seconds. We're proud to see Ocean on this list."