en.Wedoany.com Reported - Savi Security has secured $7 million in seed funding and launched an app for iPhone and Android devices, designed to protect users from highly realistic scam messages generated by artificial intelligence. The funding round was led by Acrew Capital, with participation from Magnify Ventures, TTCER, and Resolute Ventures.
Savi Security was founded after an incident involving the mother of founder Patrick Coughlin. She received a call that appeared to be from her daughter's number, with the caller claiming to have kidnapped her daughter and demanding a $1,200 ransom. The scammer accurately spoofed the number, voice, and even mentioned the location of a nearby Walmart. The mother eventually discovered it was an AI-generated scam by contacting her daughter directly. Coughlin was then serving as Senior Vice President of Cisco's security product division. His previous cloud security startup, TruSTAR, was acquired by Splunk in May 2021 for a reported $82 million, and he joined Cisco following its acquisition of Splunk in 2024.
Coughlin attributes this incident to the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI tools, which have significantly lowered the cost and barrier to executing such scams. Targeted attacks once reserved for enterprises or governments can now be deployed on a massive scale against ordinary consumers thanks to AI technology. According to data from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), losses from impersonation scams in reported cybercrimes totaled $3.5 billion in 2025, triple the amount in 2020. A 2025 research report from Malwarebytes indicates that Generation Z is more frequently targeted by text message scams than other generations, and falls victim in approximately 25% of cases.
The Savi team has developed a real-time intervention tool. The company first launched a free website called Scamwise, allowing users to anonymously submit suspicious text messages, photos, or emails for AI model analysis. The site received 50,000 submissions in about four months, growing by roughly 10,000 per week, and reached a total of 100,000 submissions by the app's launch date. Data collected by Scamwise is used to train Savi's scam detection model, which currently primarily utilizes Google's Gemini and can switch to other voice detection models on demand via an AI gateway.
The newly launched paid app filters text messages, voicemails, and calls. Its core feature is real-time call monitoring: during a suspicious call, users can choose to add the app's live agent as a listener, and the system identifies behavioral cues during the conversation to determine if it is a scam. The service costs $8 per month or $63 per year, covering the entire household with no limit on the number of users.
Coughlin stated that AI technology "creates more scammers" because it lowers the barrier to deceiving others. Savi Security's solution is positioned as a new form of protective tool, leveraging AI to combat AI-driven scams.
