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

Savi Security seeks to protect everyday people from the new generation of incredibly convincing AI-generated scams, whether they are delivered via text messages, emails, or phone calls.

The company just raised $7 million in seed funding and will launch its iPhone and Android app 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 horrible incident involving the founders’ mother.

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

His cell phone rang with his 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 bloodcurdling scream and then my sister says, ‘You have to do what they tell you.’ And then a man calls 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 referenced the location of the Walmart she frequented.

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

Coughlin, like his mother, was shocked.

“What I was thinking, after calming my mother down, is: What’s fundamentally changed in the underlying cybercriminal economy is that we can now leverage the same kind of sophistication that I’d seen targeted at government agencies, and then Fortune 500 companies? And now we’re deploying that sophistication to the consumer?”

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

Before AI, pursuing these types of consumer scams was not financially worthwhile. Deep research on the target, technology to fake voices, etc. would be needed. These attacks primarily targeted deep pockets, such as businesses or governments, as did the technology to defend against them.

“There’s something happening right now to consumers with AI in the hands of cybercriminals,” Coughlin says. The costs of perpetrating such scams have become negligible and research material is readily available.

“You can clone a voice from three seconds of audio, from a publicly available post on social media. So we all have these traces of things that are out there in the ether, like where we’re talking or narrating, commenting on a kid’s soccer game while recording it on video and uploading it to Facebook.”

The FTC said last month that people who report online crimes collectively lost $3.5 billion to imposter scams in 2025, triple the amount in 2020. While the majority of people who report these types of scams are older Americans, some research implies that Generation Z is also highly susceptible. Research from 2025 by Malwarebytes, a maker of antivirus and anti-malware tools, reported that Generation Z was targeted by text scams more frequently than other generations, falling 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 ​​scam detection model they were creating by launching a free website called Scam Wise. It is anonymous, no registration is necessary. Simply upload any suspicious text, photo or email and Scam Wise will determine if it is likely fake.

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

Scam Wise proved to be a source of data available to help train Savi’s scam detection AI model. The startup currently primarily uses Google’s Gemini, but has built its software on an AI gateway, allowing it to leverage other AI models as needed, such as specific voice detection options.

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

These 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 app’s live agent as a listener. Savi listens for behavioral cues that can identify if the situation is a scam while the call is in progress.

Savi’s fees are also a bit unusual. It charges $8 a month, with a discount of $63 a year, to cover an entire family and has no limit on the number of users. So, one plan can cover a person’s kids, spouse, parents, and that uncle who always seems to need tech support. Or anyone else the primary account holder wants to add and provide administrative support to.

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

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