Why We Backed Savi: AI-Native Protection for the People Scammers Are Actually Targeting
By Mark Kraynak and Lauren Kolodny
A couple years ago, Patrick Coughlin’s mother picked up the phone and heard what sounded exactly like her daughter, screaming for help. Then a man came on the line, said “we’ve got your daughter,” and demanded money for her safe return. None of it was real. The voice was synthetic, the kidnapping invented, the whole thing generated and dialed at scale. She very nearly paid anyway.
That call would unsettle anyone. For Patrick, it activated a career’s worth of instincts. He had spent fifteen years in the most serious corners of cybersecurity, and he recognized exactly what he was looking at: the same playbook that nation-states and criminal syndicates run against governments and enterprises, now pointed at his 70-something mom in Kansas City. So he went looking for the company that should already exist to protect her. He could not find it. So he and his brother built it.
That company is Savi, and we are proud to have led Savi’s $7M seed round.
The threat moved to consumers, and the industry did not follow
Digital fraud is now the fastest growing crime in the country. Americans lose well over $100B a year to scams, and by some estimates approaching $200B once you account for how much goes unreported. Imposter scams have been the single largest fraud category for nine years running, now close to one in three reports, with a record $3.5B in reported losses last year alone. The losses cut across every generation. Americans over 60 lost a record $7.75B in 2025, up 59% year over year, while Gen Z is more than three times as likely as Boomers to fall for an online scam.
AI is the accelerant. It has handed scammers a cheap, endlessly patient, infinitely scalable impersonation engine, and the grim truth is that those productivity gains are reaching the scammers faster than they are reaching the rest of us. It is the subject of Patrick’s new book, “Dark Side of the Boom.”
And yet nearly all of the innovation in security has been built for institutions. Consumers have been handed a spam folder, a blocklist, and a shrug. The few consumer players that exist are largely roll-ups of older technology, not built for a world where any voice, face, or message can be faked on demand.
A team we have known, and backed, for more than a decade
Patrick is a repeat founder for us, and backing him again was an easy decision. We have known him since 2012, and we first invested in him years ago at our predecessor firm, leading a round in his last company, TruSTAR, the cyber threat-intelligence platform later acquired by Splunk. He went on to lead security go-to-market through Splunk’s acquisition by Cisco, and before all of it he worked counterterrorism and cyber for the U.S. government.
What always set Patrick apart, even back at TruSTAR, was a rare combination: an operator who could go toe to toe on the hardest security problems while thinking instinctively like a consumer. We watched him build serious infrastructure for governments and the Fortune 500. Savi is where he finally turns that same depth toward regular families, which is exactly the founder you want attacking this problem.
His co-founder and brother, Ryan Coughlin, brings the other half. Ryan is a consumer and AI product leader who has built products used by millions at Apple, Spotify, and beyond. Savi is where enterprise-grade security expertise meets genuinely consumer-grade product instincts, and that combination is rare.
What they are building
Savi is an always-on iOS and Android app that reads the calls, texts, and voicemails coming at you and flags the scams before you ever pick up. It quietly filters junk texts, vets unknown callers, and can even ride along on a live call and warn you the moment it smells like a scam. Crucially, one plan covers an entire family, parents, partners, kids, and grandparents, because protection in the real world is something we do for the people we love, not just ourselves.
The early signal is strong. Savi’s free public tool, Scamwise, has reviewed more than 50,000 submissions in its first few months, and more than half were scams. It is already feeding suspected-scam data to the FTC and FBI, helping the people charged with this problem finally see its true scale.
Savi is building the first AI-native consumer security brand for the AI era, taking the caliber of defense that until now only governments and the Fortune 500 could afford and putting it in the hands of the families who need it most.
We led Savi’s $7M seed, with participation from Magnify Ventures, TTCER, and Resolute Ventures. The capital will accelerate Savi’s behavioral AI and bring its full suite of family protection to market.
To Patrick, Ryan, and the entire Savi team: welcome (back!) to the crew.
More on Savi at savisecurity.com, the free scam checker at scamwise.com, and Patrick’s book “Dark Side of the Boom: How Scammers Hijacked the AI Revolution” at darksideoftheboom.com.