Apate.AI, the Sydney-born AI bots platform used by the Commonwealth Bank to engage with and gather intelligence on scammers, has raised a US$8.15 million (A$11.4m) Seed round as it relocates to the US to support its global ambitions.
The round was led by Silicon Valley VC Lobby Capital, with support from OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures and Baobab Ventures.
Apate previously raised $2.5 million, led by OIF, a year ago. It now has operations in Australia, Europe, Asia and Africa.
The new capital will go towards international expansion and platform development, with a London office opening in the next quarter to serve the European market, having become US-incorporated as a Delaware company. Cofounder and chief product officer Peter Eckermann will relocate to the US to lead Apate’s North American expansion. The tech and research teams are also growing and will remain Sydney-based.
The cyber intelligence platform turns the tables on the scam industry, which costs around $1.4 trillion a year globally, by flipping the script and disrupting their business model. It builds and deploys armies of adversarial conversational AI agents to infiltrate fraud networks, engaging the fraudsters across all communication channels to extract real-time intelligence and develop countermeasures.
Banks, telcos and governments spend billions on scam detection and blocking, but most tools watch for fraud after it happens.
Apate steps onto the battleground, deploying realistic voice and text agents designed to mimic real victims. They’re so convincing, some conversations with scammers have lasted as long as 2 hours.
Client CBA has now run more than 2.5 million autonomous conversations with threat actors and extracted over 250,000 intelligence artefacts, subsequently fed into the disruption pipelines of its customers.
Cofounder and CEO Prof. Dali Kaafar said that for the first time, the people defending against fraud can get ahead of it.
“Our agents engage scammers directly, waste their time and money, and turn their tactics into intelligence that protects the people they target,” he said.
“This round takes that to institutions and their customers worldwide.”
The move comes amid a global regulatory shift toward more proactive defences against scams, as countries regulate what was seen as a reputational issue to a balance-sheet obligation for institutions that can prevent fraud
Lobby Capital partner Buddy Arnheim said scammers are not only increasingly sophisticated, they’re proliferating exponentially as they embrace AI.
“As a result, the number of victims and the related losses are accelerating. The proprietary and pioneering Apate solution is combatting this with a proactive approach that is showing unparalleled results, and they are just getting started,” he said.
“We are thrilled to back a team with such unique technical expertise and a compelling market leadership position.
