Australian Startup Apate Raises Nearly $10M for Anti-Scam AI Agents

Australian startup Apate has raised nearly $10 million in funding to deploy AI agents that actively engage with fraudsters across phone calls, emails, and messages to waste their time and gather intelligence. To date, the company's undercover agents have accumulated 17 years' worth of wasted time for scammers across 2.5 million conversations. This shifts cybersecurity from reactive defense to proactive offense by disrupting fraud operations before they target actual victims and extracting critical evidence like bank accounts and crypto wallets. The approach has demonstrated notable success, with major clients like the Commonwealth Bank of Australia reporting a 76% drop in public fraud losses. Apate utilizes both frontier models and fine-tuned proprietary models to mimic diverse human voices, accents, and ages to handle scam interactions at scale. The Sydney-born company secured an $8.15 million seed round led by Silicon Valley's Lobby Capital as it expands internationally into the US and UK markets.