The call that launched a startup
Two years ago, Patrick Coughlin’s mother received a terrifying phone call. The caller ID showed her daughter’s number. A woman’s voice — unmistakably her daughter’s — screamed, “Mom, they’ve got me.” Then a man demanded $1,200, threatening to kill the daughter in a Walmart parking lot.
Coughlin’s mom kept her composure. She hung up, called her daughter, and confirmed she was safe. The entire kidnapping was an AI-generated hoax. The scammer had cloned the daughter’s voice from a few seconds of audio, spoofed her number, and even referenced the specific Walmart she shopped at — information scraped from social media.
Patrick Coughlin, then a senior vice president at Cisco, was shaken. “What has fundamentally changed in the cybercriminal economy that we can now deploy the same sophistication aimed at governments and Fortune 500 companies against ordinary consumers?” he recalls thinking.
The answer, he realized, was cheap, powerful AI. And it led him and his brother Ryan to launch Savi Security, a startup that aims to do for personal safety what antivirus software did for computers: give regular people a real-time defense against AI-powered scams.
How AI changed the fraud game — and why Savi matters now
Before generative AI, running a voice-cloning scam on a random family wasn’t worth the effort. It required deep research, expensive equipment, and technical skill. Criminals reserved those tools for high-value targets: executives, government officials, wealthy individuals.
That calculus has flipped. “You can clone a voice off three seconds of audio from a public social media post,” Coughlin says. A parent filming a kid’s soccer game and uploading it to Facebook has just handed scammers the raw material for a convincing kidnap call.
The Federal Trade Commission reported that Americans lost $3.5 billion to imposter scams in 2025 — triple the 2020 figure. And it’s not just older generations getting fleeced. Research from Malwarebytes shows Gen Z is actually targeted more often with text scams than any other demographic, and falls for them about 25% of the time.
“AI has made fraud accessible,” Coughlin says. “We’re creating fraudsters because we’re lowering the barrier to deceiving people.”
What Savi’s app actually does
Savi launched its iOS and Android app on Tuesday, backed by $7 million in seed funding led by Acrew Capital, with participation from Magnify Ventures, TTCER, and Resolute Ventures. The app screens texts, emails, voicemails, and incoming calls for signs of a scam.
That feature set overlaps with existing tools from companies like Malwarebytes. But Savi’s standout feature is live-call monitoring. During a suspicious phone conversation, a user can tap to add Savi’s AI as a silent listener. The software analyzes the call in real time, listening for behavioral patterns and linguistic tells that indicate fraud — without the user having to hang up and check a report.
The company tested its detection model by launching a free, anonymous website called Scam Wise. Users upload suspicious texts, emails, or images. No registration required. In four months, Scam Wise received 50,000 submissions, and is now growing by about 10,000 submissions per week. That data feeds directly into Savi’s AI training pipeline.
Under the hood, Savi primarily uses Google’s Gemini model, but the system is built on an AI gateway that lets it switch to voice-specific or other models as needed.
Pricing that covers the whole family
Savi’s pricing model is unusual. It costs $8 per month, or $63 per year, and covers an unlimited number of family members. One plan protects a person’s kids, spouse, parents, and that tech-averse uncle. The primary account holder can add anyone and manage their security settings centrally.
The logic is simple: scammers target the most vulnerable person in a family, not just the most tech-savvy one. A single compromised relative can cause havoc — financial loss, emotional trauma, or worse.
Real-time defense against a new generation of fraud
Coughlin sees Savi as a modern equivalent of the antivirus software that became essential in the 1990s. The threat landscape has shifted from malicious code to malicious AI-generated content. The defense needs to be equally adaptive and real-time.
“The same AI tools that let scammers clone voices and fabricate emergencies can be used to detect them,” he says. Savi’s AI looks for inconsistencies in language, emotional manipulation patterns, and the kind of pressure tactics that legitimate callers rarely use.
The startup’s timing is fortuitous. As AI voice cloning tools become more accessible — some require just a few seconds of audio and cost pennies per use — the number of plausible-sounding scam calls is exploding. The FTC data suggests the problem is accelerating, not plateauing.
The bottom line
Savi isn’t the only company working on AI scam detection, but its focus on live-call intervention and family-wide coverage sets it apart. The founders’ background helps: Patrick spent years in national cyber defense and later built cloud security products at Splunk and Cisco; Ryan worked on consumer products at Apple and Spotify.
Their mother’s close call was a wake-up call — not just for their family, but for an industry that has largely left consumers to fend for themselves against AI-powered fraud. Savi’s bet is that most people would pay $8 a month for a tool that quietly listens for the scam before they fall for it.
Given that the average victim of an imposter scam lost hundreds of dollars in 2025, that arithmetic may be easy to justify.
