Somewhere inside a scam operation, a fraudster can spend two hours persuading a victim to hand over money.
For Apate.AI, the useful part is that the “victim” may never have existed.
The Sydney-born company has built thousands of conversational AI agents designed to behave like believable scam targets. They answer calls and messages, keep fraudsters occupied and quietly collect the infrastructure behind the operation: phishing URLs, mule bank accounts, crypto wallets, phone numbers, impersonation tactics and scripts. Some conversations can continue for as long as two hours.
Now Apate has raised an oversubscribed US$8.15 million seed round, led by Lobby Capital, with participation from OIF Ventures, Investible, Concept Ventures and Baobab Ventures. At the same time, the company has reincorporated in Delaware, effective August 25, 2026, as it turns an Australian research project into a global fraud-intelligence company.
That origin explains why Apate feels different from another fraud-detection startup.
The company emerged from research at the Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub after its founders became frustrated by stories of vulnerable people losing their life savings to scams. Their response was to reverse the usual defensive logic. Instead of waiting for fraud signals to appear after an attack, Apate sends artificial targets directly into scam networks.
The result is closer to counter-intelligence than conventional blocking.
Apate Voice uses multilingual personas trained to sustain convincing conversations. Apate Text operates across channels such as WhatsApp, Telegram and SMS. Apate Insights then turns those interactions into threat intelligence, connecting scam tactics with accounts, wallets, identities, campaigns and infrastructure. The company says its agents can scale from dozens of human-led engagements to thousands without requiring equivalent increases in fraud-team headcount.
And the artificial victims are already talking.
Apate says its systems have completed more than 2.5 million autonomous conversations with threat actors and extracted over 250,000 intelligence artefacts. Its technology is already operating with tier-one institutions including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where a small team can oversee thousands of live scam conversations simultaneously.
That creates an unusual data flywheel. Every scammer who believes they are manipulating a victim can inadvertently teach Apate more about the network they belong to.
Founder and CEO Professor Dali Kaafar describes the shift simply:
“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. This round takes that to institutions and their customers worldwide.”
The timing is becoming harder to ignore. Apate cites global scam losses of US$1.03 trillion annually, while regulatory changes in Australia, the UK and Europe are placing greater pressure on banks, telcos and other institutions to prevent scams proactively rather than simply compensate for damage afterward.
The new capital will push that model outside Australia. Apate plans to open a London office next quarter, build its US presence and expand its research and technology team in Sydney. Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Peter Eckermann will relocate to the United States to lead North American expansion.
There is also a human layer around the software. Apate’s Bot Army and vetted Scam Advisory Group allow people encountering scams in the wild to redirect attempts safely into Apate’s controlled bot network, where agents can engage the fraudster and feed the resulting intelligence back into the system.
Scammers have used automation to make fraud cheap enough to operate at enormous scale.
Apate is building the inverse: a world where fake victims are just as scalable, every wasted conversation costs the attacker time, and every failed scam can reveal something about the network behind it.