Cyber-intelligence startup Apate.ai, a countermeasure to Australia’s $2 billion scam industry, has raised $2.5 million in Seed funding.
The round was led by OIF Ventures with participation from Investible.
The funds are for product development and international expansion, including hiring engineering and go-to-market teams, as well as expanding its partnerships with financial institutions, telcos, and governments both in Australia and key international markets.
Apate.ai was founded last year as a spin-out from Macquarie University. The startup has developed thousands of cutting-edge conversational AI bots that engage scammers across voice calls and messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram and SMS.
Last month Apate.ai announced a partnership with CommBank to create AI-powered “victim bots” to engage with scammers and waste their time, while also gathering intelligence and data.
The close to real-time scam threat intelligence is used by CommBank to safeguard both customers and the wider community.
The bots simulate realistic conversations – right down to swearing and Aussie slang – to divert, distract, and gather critical intelligence scammers, turning those tactics against them.
Cofounder and CEO Professor Dali Kaafar said they’re building an army of bots to dismantle scammer operations at scale.
“Scammers think they’re untouchable. We’re here to change that,” he said.
“Our bots divert and distract scammers, keeping them away from real victims whilst extracting critical threat intelligence. The intelligence we gather is used to further disrupt scam operations at their source, helping to protect vulnerable communities. We’re a mission-led organisation, and this funding allows us to scale our impact exponentially.”
$2bn lost to scams
In 2024, Australians lost in excess of $2 billion to scams, with more than 494,000 incidents reported.
The startup has also been working with teclo TPG Telecom, and the bots have diverted over 280,000 scam calls, amounting to over 100 days of scammers’ time and resources wasted in decoy conversations.
Prof Kaafar said the deployment has helped prevent more than $7.6 million in potential customer losses, while gathering critical intelligence on scammer TTPs (tactics, techniques and procedures), including the identification of over 20,000 organisations that have been impersonated, including banks, telcos, and government bodies such MyGov and the ATO.
His cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer Brad Joffe said the bots take scam responses from reactive to predictive.
“We’re giving institutions like CommBank the tools to act faster and smarter against a threat that’s evolving by the hour,” he said.
“This is just the beginning. We’re laying the foundation for a global intelligence infrastructure that can help dismantle scam operations before they ever reach real victims.”
Gathering scam intelligence
The Apate platform uses conversational AI and machine learning to adapt in real time, deploying thousands of diverse AI bots who mimic different human emotions, accents, and behaviours to keep scammers engaged longer and extract meaningful intelligence. That intelligence is then shared with financial institutions, telcos and government agencies to help them identify new scam typologies and enable takedown efforts to protect consumers.
“This is the beginning of a new paradigm,” Professor Kaafar said.
“The same way we invest in physical security systems, we’re building a new intelligence layer to detect and disrupt scams at their source – with intelligence collected from the mouths and keystrokes of the scammers themselves.”
The funding announced comes during Scamwatch‘s annual Scam Awareness Week.
OIF Ventures cofounder Jerry Stesel praised the global opportunity for Apate and its “extraordinary impact potential”.
“Their combination of world-class academic talent, AI engineering, and commercial focus positions them to become a category-defining company,” he said
More at Apate.ai – and below is an example of an Australian-voiced Apate bot taking on a scammer.
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