Savi’s app aims to protect consumers from realistic AI scams like kidnappers demanding ransom

Brothers Patrick and Ryan Coughlin, each with distinguished careers in the tech industry (Patrick worked in national cyber defense, and at Splunk and Cisco; and Ryan in consumer products at Apple and Spotify), have launched a new kind of security startup.

Savi Security seeks to protect everyday people from the new crop of incredibly convincing AI-generated scams, whether sent via text, email, or phone calls.

The company just raised $7 million in seed funding and is launching its app for iPhone and Android on Tuesday. The round was led by Acrew Capital, with participation from Magnify Ventures, TTCER and Resolute Ventures.

The inspiration for the company came from a horrific incident involving the founders’ mother.

About two years ago, Patrick Coughlin’s mother called him distraught and said she had just received a call from a man saying he had kidnapped Coughlin’s sister. At the time, he was senior vice president of security products at Cisco. (He ended up there after Splunk bought his cloud security startup TruSTAR for a reported $82 million in May 2021. In 2024, Cisco bought Splunk.)

Her cell phone rang with her daughter’s caller ID, Coughlin said. During that conversation, “she thinks she hears my sister’s voice saying, ‘Mom, they got me.’ There’s a blood-curdling scream and then my sister says, “You have to do what they tell you.” And then a guy comes on the phone and says, ‘If you don’t pay us $1,200 right now, we’re going to kill your daughter in the parking lot of the local Walmart,'” he continued.

The scammer had accurately spoofed Coughlin’s sister’s number and her voice, pointing to the location of the Walmart she visited.

Fortunately, the mother kept her wits about her, called the daughter and discovered that she was fine. The kidnapping was an AI-generated scam.

Coughlin, like his mother, was shocked.

“What I thought, after calming my mother down, is: What has fundamentally changed in the underlying cybercriminal economy that now allows us to apply the same kind of sophistication that I had seen in government agencies and later in Fortune 500 companies? And now we’re bringing that sophistication to the consumer?”

The answer, of course, is cheap and powerful LLMs and other generative AI tools.

Before AI, pursuing such attacks on consumers was not financially worthwhile. It would require deep research into the target, vote-spoofing technology, and so on. Such attacks primarily targeted only deep pockets, such as corporations or governments, as did the technology to defend against them.

“Something is happening to consumers right now with AI in the hands of cybercriminals,” says Coughlin. The cost of committing such scams has become negligible and the research materials are easily available.

“You can clone a voice from three seconds of audio, from a publicly available social media post. So we all have traces of things that are in the air — like where we’re talking or narrating; commenting on a kid’s soccer game while we’re videotaping it, and putting it on Facebook.”

The FTC said Last month, it was found that people reporting online crimes will collectively lose $3.5 billion to scams in 2025, tripling the amount in 2020. While the majority of people reporting such scams are older Americans, research shows that Generation Z is also highly susceptible. A 2025 study by Malwarebytes, a maker of antivirus and antimalware tools, reported that Generation Z was more likely to be targeted by text message scams than other generations, and fell for them about 25% of the time.

The Coughlin brothers’ idea was to develop a real-time intervention tool.

They tested their idea and the AI ​​fraud detection model they were building by launching a free website called Scam wise. It is anonymous, no registration required. Just upload suspicious text messages, photos, or emails, and Scam Wise will determine if it’s likely to be fake.

“We launched that about four months ago. We’ve had 50,000 submissions, and it’s now growing by about 10,000 submissions or more every week,” Coughlin said.

Scam Wise proved to be a source of in-the-wild data to help train Savi’s AI model for scam detection. The startup currently mainly uses Google’s Gemini, but has built its software on an AI gateway, allowing it to use other AI models, such as voice detection-specific options, if necessary.

On Tuesday, Savi launched a paid product, an iOS and Android app for consumers, that can screen text messages, voicemails and incoming calls for scams.

Such features are available in many different products (such as Malwarebytes), but Savi’s most impressive feature is live call tracking.

During a suspicious phone call, a user can choose to add the app’s live agent as a listener. Savi listens for behavioral cues that can identify whether the situation is a problem while the conversation is ongoing.

Savi’s fees are also a bit unusual. It costs $8 per month, discounted to $63 per year, for an entire family, and there is no limit to the number of users. So one plan could cover one’s children, spouse, parents, and that uncle who always seems to need tech support. Or anyone who wants to add the primary account holder and provide administrative support.

AI has changed the terms of “how accessible it is to be a fraudster,” Coughlin said. “We are creating fraudsters because we are breaking down the barrier of misleading people. So not only do we have the organized criminals and the syndicates behind this, but ordinary people are being tempted to commit fraud.”

Savi Security’s response is like a new generation of antivirus software: one that uses AI in real time, just like the bad guys do.