Brothers Patrick Coughlin and Ryan Coughlin — each with lengthy technology-sector careers (Patrick in national cyber defense, Splunk and Cisco; Ryan in consumer products at Apple and Spotify) — have founded Savi Security to protect everyday consumers from increasingly convincing AI-generated scams delivered via text, email or phone.
The company raised $7 million in seed funding, with the round led by Acrew Capital and participation from Magnify Ventures, TTCER and Resolute Ventures. Savi launched its iPhone and Android app on Tuesday.
Origin story
The founders were motivated by a terrifying personal incident: about two years ago Patrick Coughlin’s mother called him distraught after receiving a call from someone claiming to have kidnapped his sister. The caller ID displayed the sister’s number; during the call the mother believed she heard the sister’s voice, a scream, and then a man demanding payment of $1,200 or threatening to kill the daughter in a local Walmart parking lot. The sister was unharmed — the kidnapping was an AI-generated scam.
The episode prompted the brothers to ask what had changed in the cybercriminal economy so that the same sophistication once directed at governments and Fortune 500s was now being deployed against consumers. Their answer: inexpensive, powerful large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI tools that make voice cloning and targeted research cheap and widely accessible.
Scale of the problem
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that people reporting online crimes collectively lost $3.5 billion to imposter scams in 2025, triple the amount reported in 2020. While most reports come from older Americans, a 2025 Malwarebytes study found that Gen Z is targeted more often with text scams than other generations and falls for them about 25% of the time.
From Scam Wise to Savi’s model
To test their approach and collect data, the founders launched a free site called Scam Wise where anyone can anonymously upload suspicious texts, emails or photos for a quick assessment — no registration required. Launched about four months ago, Scam Wise has received 50,000 submissions and is growing by roughly 10,000 submissions per week. Those real-world submissions helped train Savi’s scam-detection AI.
Savi currently relies mostly on Google’s Gemini, but the company built its software on an AI gateway so it can tap other models as needed, including models specialized for voice detection.
Product and pricing
Savi’s consumer app, released Tuesday for iOS and Android, screens texts, voicemails and incoming calls for scam indicators. Similar screening exists in other products, but Savi’s standout capability is live call monitoring: during a suspicious call a user can opt to add the app’s live agent as a listener, and Savi monitors behavioral signals in real time to identify whether the interaction is a grift.
The pricing is family-focused: $8 per month or $63 per year covers an entire family with no cap on the number of users, allowing one account to protect children, spouses, parents or other relatives.
Patrick Coughlin argues that AI has lowered the barrier to becoming a fraudster by making deception tools widely available, which increases the pool of potential attackers beyond organized criminals. Savi Security positions itself as a new-generation defensive tool — an AI-powered, real-time protector that aims to detect and intervene in scams the moment they occur.
