Two brothers with backgrounds in cybersecurity and consumer tech have started a company built around a terrifying phone call their mother received two years ago. Savi Security, founded by Patrick and Ryan Coughlin, just raised $7 million in seed funding and is now available as an app for iPhone and Android. The round was led by Acrew Capital, with participation from Magnify Ventures, TTCER, and Resolute Ventures.
The company’s goal is straightforward: protect regular people from AI-generated scams delivered through texts, emails, and phone calls. As TechCrunch reported, the inspiration came directly from a fake kidnapping call that nearly fooled the founders’ own mother.
Patrick Coughlin, who previously served as senior vice president of security products at Cisco after the company acquired Splunk, which had earlier bought his startup TruSTAR for a reported $82 million, got a panicked call from his mother. She had just heard what she believed was her daughter’s voice saying she had been kidnapped, followed by a man threatening to kill her unless she paid $1,200. The caller had spoofed the daughter’s phone number, cloned her voice, and even referenced the specific Walmart she regularly visited. The daughter was fine. The entire thing was AI-generated.
That incident sits at the heart of why Savi Security exists. Patrick Coughlin spent years watching sophisticated cyberattacks aimed at governments and Fortune 500 companies. What changed is that the tools behind those attacks are now cheap, fast, and available to almost anyone. “You can clone a voice off three seconds of audio, off a publicly available social media post,” he said. A comment on a kid’s football game video posted to Facebook is enough raw material to build a convincing fake.
The numbers back up the urgency. The FTC reported that Americans lost $3.5 billion to imposter scams in 2025, triple the figure from 2020. Older Americans file the majority of complaints, but a 2025 study by Malwarebytes found that Gen Z was targeted more frequently by text scams than other age groups and fell for them about 25% of the time. This is not a problem limited to one demographic.
Before building a paid product, the Coughlin brothers tested their AI detection model through a free, anonymous website called Scamwise. No account needed. Users could upload suspicious texts, images, or emails and get an assessment. In four months, the site collected 50,000 submissions, growing by around 10,000 per week. By the time the app launched, that total had hit 100,000. Those real-world examples helped train Savi’s detection model, which currently runs mostly on Google’s Gemini but is built on an AI gateway that lets the team pull in other models, including voice-specific options, as needed.
The Savi app can screen incoming texts, voicemails, and calls for signs of a scam. Other security products offer similar features, but Savi’s standout capability is live call monitoring. If something feels off during a phone call, a user can add the app as a silent listener. The app then watches for behavioral signals that suggest the caller is running a con, while the conversation is still happening.
Pricing is also set up differently from most security software:
- $8 per month, or $63 per year
- One subscription covers an entire family with no cap on the number of users
- The account holder can add children, a spouse, parents, or anyone else they want to protect and manage
That family-first model is a deliberate choice. The people most likely to be targeted by fake kidnapping calls or grandparent scams are often the least likely to be managing their own cybersecurity software. Covering an entire household under one plan removes a real barrier.
Savi is entering a crowded space. Malwarebytes, phone carriers, and even some phone operating systems have started adding scam detection features. What Savi is betting on is that real-time intervention, especially during a live call when panic can cloud judgment, is where existing tools fall short. The moment a person believes their child is in danger, they are not stopping to check an app. Having something that works automatically in the background is a different approach.
Coughlin is blunt about what AI has done to the fraud business. It has lowered the barrier so much that it is not just organized crime running these operations. Everyday people are being drawn in because the tools are accessible and the setup costs are near zero. The response Savi is building is essentially a new category of consumer security software, one that fights AI-generated deception with AI-powered detection, running in real time rather than after the damage is done.
