Most companies put AI agents to work speeding up products or workflows. Apate.ai sends them undercover to get scammed.
Founded in 2024 on research from Macquarie University in Sydney, the Australian startup runs thousands of AI agents that pose as innocent victims. They answer scam calls, reply to shady messages and emails, follow phishing links, and join social media groups to bait fraudsters. The agents adopt varied ages, genders, and accents, and speak multiple languages to keep scammers engaged long enough to learn something useful.
Apate says its fleet has wasted 17 years of scammers' time across 2.5 million conversations. For its customers - banks, telecom companies, government agencies, and utilities - the agents try to extract details usually learned only after a victim is hit: bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, malicious websites, impersonated brands, and other scam operational details. Apate feeds that intelligence to customers for their anti-fraud measures.
The company is a finalist in this year's Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, pitching a panel of VC judges at Moscone West in San Francisco through Thursday, October 15.
The FBI received more than 22,000 complaints of AI-related crimes in 2025, with about $893 million in losses; more than $632 million came from investment scams where fraudsters use AI to run conversations and deepfake celebrities, executives, and trusted figures.
The idea began with a real scam call. Years ago, founder and CEO Dali Kaafar was at a family picnic when an unknown number called. Realizing it was a scammer, he played dumb for his kids and kept the call going 44 minutes. Everyone laughed, but Kaafar noticed those were 44 minutes the scammer hadn't spent on a real victim - and 44 minutes of his own time. Could he automate it and learn something useful? That question led to research at Macquarie University, where he and colleagues used machine learning and natural language processing to uncover scam call content and develop better detection and prevention.
"Most of the industry works after the fact. Telcos block numbers, but scammers just get new ones. Banks watch transactions, but by then the scammer has already reached the customer. We go to the scammer directly and get the information before anyone gets hurt," co-founder and chief commercial officer Brad Joffe told TechCrunch. "Our AI agents talk to tens of thousands of scammers every day across calls, messages, email, and the web."
Joffe said Apate uses frontier models and its own fine-tuned models, trained on agent-scammer conversations and Kaafar's Macquarie research. Customers get access to the agent fleet plus an insights portal with intelligence and analytics on scams targeting their users or employees, brands, and products. They can assign agents specific missions, such as obtaining a bank account number or crypto-wallet address. Text agents can search forums, investment groups, and social platforms for scam activity, then enter conversations under fabricated identities to surface scammers' details.
Customers include Commonwealth Bank of Australia, TPG Telecom, and other utilities, telcos, and government agencies. Joffe said TPG has diverted nearly 590,000 calls to Apate's 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.
Apate raised $8.15 million in seed funding in August from Lobby Capital, OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures, and Baobab Ventures. Joffe said the 20-person company has raised just under $10 million total and plans to spend the round on product and international expansion, including a London office and a larger U.S. presence.
"Apate is named after the Greek goddess of deception, which felt appropriate given what our agents do," Joffe said, adding that the startup features scammers swearing at the bots in its pitch material. "We track that as a sign of frustration and every swear word gets celebrated by us at Apate. We are probably one of the only businesses in the world that celebrates when people swear at our product."
Source: TechCrunch