Savi’s app aims to protect consumers from realistic AI scams like kidnappers demanding ransom

Published 7 July 2026 · tech

Brothers Patrick and Ryan Coughlin, each with impressive careers in the tech industry (Patrick worked in national cyber defense, Splunk, and Cisco; and Ryan with

Brothers Patrick and Ryan Coughlin, each with impressive careers in the tech industry (Patrick worked in national cyber defense, Splunk, and Cisco; and Ryan with consumer products at Apple and Spotify), have launched a new kind of security startup. Savi Security seeks to protect everyday folks from the new crop of incredibly convincing AI-generated scams, whether they’re routed via text, emails or phone calls. The company just raised $7 million in seed funding, and is launching its app for iPhone and Android 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 horrifying incident involving the founders’ mother. About two years ago, Patrick Coughlin’s mom called him, distraught, saying she had just received a phone call from a man saying he had kidnapped Coughlin’s sister. He was senior vice president of security products at Cisco at the time. (He landed there after Splunk bought his cloud security startup TruSTAR for a reported $82 million in May 2021. In 2024, Cisco bought Splunk.) Her mobile phone rang with the caller ID of her daughter, Coughlin recounted. During that call, “she thinks she hears my sister’s voice saying, ‘Mom, they’ve got me.’ There’s a blood-curdling scream, and then my sister says, ‘You’ve got to do what they tell you.’ And then a man comes 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,’” he continued.

The scammer had accurately spoofed Coughlin’s sister’s number, her voice, and referenced the location of the Walmart she frequented. Fortunately, the mom kept her wits, called the daughter, and discovered that she was fine. The kidnapping was an AI-generated scam. Coughlin, like his mom, was shaken. “What I was thinking, after calming my mom down is: What has fundamentally changed in the underlying cybercriminal economy that we are now able to lever the same kind of sophistication that I had seen pointed at government agencies, and then later at Fortune 500 companies? And now we’re deploying that sophistication at the consumer?” The answer is, of course, cheap and powerful LLMs and other generative AI tools. Before AI, pursuing such grifts on consumers was not financially worth it. It would require in-depth research on the target, tech to spoof voices, and so on. Such attacks were primarily aimed only at deep pockets, like enterprises or governments, as was the tech to defend against them. “There’s something that’s happening right now to consumers with AI in the hands of cyber criminals,” Coughlin says. The costs to perpetrate such swindles have become negligible, and the research material, easily available. “You can clone a voice off three seconds of audio, off a publicly available social media post. So we’ve all got these traces of stuff that’s out there in the ether — like where we’re talking or narrating; commenting on a kid’s football game while videotaping it, and putting it on Facebook.” The FTC said last month that people reporting online crimes collectively lost $3.5 billion to imposter scams in 2025, triple the amount in 2020.