Brothers Patrick and Ryan Coughlin, each with impressive tech careers (Patrick worked in national cyber defense and 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 they’re launched via text message, email or phone call.
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 mom called him upset, saying she had just received a call from a man who said he had kidnapped Coughlin’s sister. He was senior vice president of security products at Cisco at the time. (It landed there after Splunk bought cloud security startup TruSTAR for a reported $82 million in May 2021. In 2024, Cisco bought Splunk.)
Her cellphone rang with her daughter’s caller ID, Coughlin said. During that call, she “thinks she hears my sister’s voice saying, ‘Mom, they’ve got me.’ There’s a blood-curdling scream, and then my sister says, “You have to do what you’re told.” And then a man gets 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,'” she continued.
The scammer had accurately spoofed Coughlin’s sister’s number, her voice and listed the Walmart location she frequented.
Luckily, the mom kept her wits about her, called the daughter and found out she was fine. The kidnapping was an AI-generated scam.
Coughlin, like his mom, was shaken.
“What I was thinking after reassuring my mom is: What has fundamentally changed in the underlying economy of cybercrime that we are now able to leverage the same kind of sophistication that I had seen demonstrated in government agencies and later in Fortune 500 companies? And now we are applying that sophistication to the consumer?”
The answer is, of course, cheap and powerful LLMs and other AI production tools.
Before AI, pursuing such consumer inconveniences was uneconomical. It would require in-depth research on the target, technology to spoof voices and so on. Such attacks mostly only targeted deep pockets such as businesses or governments, as did the technology to defend against them.
“There’s something going on right now with consumers with artificial intelligence in the hands of cybercriminals,” Coughlin says. The cost to commit such frauds has become negligible and research material is readily available.
“You can clone a voice from three seconds of audio, from a publicly available social media post. So we all have these traces of things that are out there in the ether—like where we’re talking or narrating, commentating on a kids’ soccer game while you’re filming it and putting it on Facebook.”
The FTC he said Last month people who reported online crimes collectively lost $3.5 billion to fraud in 2025, triple the amount in 2020. While the majority of people reporting such scams are older Americans, some research suggests that Gen Z is also highly susceptible. Research from 2025 by Malwarebytes, a maker of anti-virus and anti-malware tools, reported that Gen Z were more often targeted with text scams than other generations, and it fell to 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 Scamwise. It is anonymous, no registration required. Simply upload any suspicious texts, photos or emails and Scamwise will determine if it’s likely to be fake.
“We launched it about four months ago. We had 50,000 submissions and now it’s growing every week by about 10,000 submissions or more,” Coughlin said, adding that, as of Tuesday, submissions totaled 100,000.
Scamwise proved to be a source of in-the-wild data to help train Savi’s fraud detection AI model. The startup currently mostly uses Google’s Gemini, but has built its software on an AI gateway, which allows it to tap into other AI models as needed, such as voice-recognition-specific options.
On Tuesday, Savi released a paid product, an iOS and Android app for consumers that can screen texts, 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 monitoring.
During a suspicious phone conversation, a user can choose to add the application’s live agent as a listener. Savi listens for behavior commands that can determine if the condition is a problem while the call is in progress.
Savi’s fees are also a bit unusual. It charges $8/month, discounted to $63/year, to cover an entire family, and puts no limit on the number of users. So a plan can cover the children, spouse, parents and uncle of a person who always seems to need tech support. Or anyone else the primary account holder wants to add and provide administrative support to.
Artificial intelligence has changed the conditions for “how accessible it is to be a fraud,” Coughlin said. AI “creates cheaters” because it “breaks down the barrier of cheating people. So not only do we have organized criminals and syndicates behind it, but everyday people are tempted to cheat.”
Savi Security’s answer is like a new generation of virus-like software: software that uses real-time artificial intelligence to defend people, even when bad guys use it to trick them.
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