Apate sends AI agents undercover to get scammed so they can gather fraud intelligence
Most companies use AI agents to ship products faster or speed up workflows. Apate.ai sends them undercover to get scammed.
Key points
- Apate.ai deploys AI agents posing as scam victims to gather fraud intelligence for banks and telecoms.
- The Australian startup says its agents have wasted 17 years of scammers' time in 2.5 million conversations.
- Apate raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August and plans to expand internationally.
Australian startup Apate.ai sends thousands of AI agents undercover to pose as scam victims, answering scam calls, replying to shady messages and emails, following phishing links and joining social media groups to bait fraudsters. The company, founded in 2024 on research done at Macquarie University in Sydney, says the agents pretend to be people of different ages, genders and accents, speaking various languages to keep scammers engaged.
Apate says its agents have so far wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations. The information gathered, including bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers and malicious websites, is fed to customers such as banks, telecom companies, government agencies and utilities for their anti-fraud measures.
How the agents work
Apate uses both frontier models and its own fine-tuned models to power the agents and analyze conversations. Customers also get an insights portal with intelligence on scams targeting their users, employees and brands, and can assign agents missions such as obtaining a bank account number or crypto-wallet address.
The company's customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and TPG Telecom. Apate says TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to its agents, Commonwealth has seen a 76% drop in publicly reported scam losses, and an unnamed Australian bank has used its outbound agents to disrupt 22 scam campaigns.
We go to the scammer directly and get the information before anyone gets hurt
— Brad Joffe
Funding and expansion
Apate raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August from Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures and Baobab Ventures. Co-founder and chief commercial officer Brad Joffe said the 20-person company has raised just under $10 million in total.
The startup plans to spend the latest round on its product and international expansion, including opening an office in London and building a larger presence in the U.S. Apate is one of the finalists at this year's Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.
