Founded in 2024 following research at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australian startup Apate.ai deploys thousands of artificial intelligence agents designed to masquerade as innocent victims. The agents answer scam calls, respond to messages and emails, follow phishing links, and join social media groups to bait fraudsters by pretending to be people of various ages, genders, accents, and languages.
Intercepting fraudsters before losses occur
According to the company, its fleet of agents has spent 17 years of scammers’ time across 2.5 million conversations. By keeping fraudsters engaged, the undercover agents attempt to extract details typically obtained only after a victim has suffered a scam, including bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, and the brands being impersonated.
Co-founder and chief commercial officer Brad Joffe stated that while traditional industry methods often operate after an incident has occurred—such as telecommunications companies blocking numbers or banks monitoring transactions—Apate interacts directly with scammers to secure intelligence beforehand. The startup utilizes both frontier models and its own fine-tuned models, which are trained on conversations handled by its agents and founder Dali Kaafar’s prior university research.
Customer base and funding
Apate provides its corporate customers, which include banks, telecom providers, government agencies, and utilities, with access to an insights portal offering analytics on scams targeting end users, employees, and brands. Customers can also assign agents specific missions, such as acquiring a crypto-wallet address or bank account number.
Client implementations include TPG Telecom routing nearly 590,000 calls to Apate’s agents, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia reporting a 76% reduction in publicly reported scam losses, and an unnamed Australian bank utilizing outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns.
In August, the 20-person startup raised $8.15 million in seed funding from investors including Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures, and Baobab Ventures. Bringing total funding to just under $10 million, Apate plans to allocate the capital toward product development and international expansion, including establishing a London office and increasing its presence in the United States.