Investment Notes: Apate.ai

Investible is excited to announce that we have participated in Apate.ai’s A$2.5 million Seed round, led by OIF Ventures!

Spun out of Macquarie University in 2024, Apate is building a real-time threat intelligence platform that uses advanced conversational AI bots to engage with scammers across voice and text channels, wasting their time and resources and extracting critical intelligence. The data is then surfaced via a SaaS dashboard and real-time alerts to help corporates (such as financial services and telecommunications firms) and Government agencies proactively detect, disrupt and dismantle scams at scale.

The bots –who answer tens of thousands of calls per day and thousands of text messages per day – indistinguishably mimic real humans, engaging scammers for up to 50 minutes to extract valuable intelligence (e.g. financial instruments, scam tactics, attack vectors, impersonated organisations, etc.). These insights are then shared with their corporate customers to assist with fraud prevention and real-time threat monitoring.

The Investment Team met the founders back in mid-2024 when their product was still in MVP stage. Since reconnecting with the founders earlier this year, we were blown away by the level of realism in the bots’ conversational abilities, and their ability to land commercial engagements with various reputable organisations, including the likes of CBA and TPG Telecom. Working with TPG, Apate’s bots have diverted over 280,000 scam calls, amounting to over 100 days of scammers’ time and resources wasted in decoy conversations.

To see Apate’s conversational bots in action, visit their website.

Strong regulatory tailwinds driven by the newly passed scams prevention legislation

In 2024, ~A$2 billion in consumer and business scam losses were reported by The National Anti-Scam Centre, with large corporates spending a significant amount (e.g. CBA invested ~$800 million in FY24) to mitigate scammers, indemnify fraud victims, rebuild consumer trust and remain compliant with increasing regulatory pressures. Scam attacks are also becoming more prevalent with the use of AI deepfake impersonators (comprising ~40% of biometric fraud globally in 2024) and as scammer sophistication levels continuing to rise.

The impetus for Australian corporates intensifies after the Scams Prevention Framework (SPF) Bill came into force in February 2025,imposing fines of up to A$50 million for financial institutions, telecommunications firms, broadcasting services and social media platforms if they do not take ‘reasonable steps’ to report, disrupt and respond to scams and attempted scams in their businesses. The ACCC will also have new powers to direct businesses to take specific action to keep their customers safe from scammers.

Other countries also seem to be aligning with the Australian regulatory perspective on proactive fraud prevention. For example, the UK are already enforcing payment service providers, such as banks, to reimburse victims of authorised push payment fraud regardless of scammer association.

Apate is in a prime position to capitalise on these global regulatory tailwinds as there is already strong market demand from organisations in Australia and other analogous geographies.

Robust pipeline of reputable enterprise customers

Apate has managed to build up a robust pipeline of customers (primarily enterprise organisations), with ~50% of these companies reaching out to Apate inbound and~50% of all prospects coming from outside Australia. This demonstrates the team’s ability to market the product and source deals globally with very minimal resources.

The calibre of the customer pipeline is impressive given the company’s infancy, comprising of blue-chip organisations within financial services and telecommunications, who have already had multiple meetings with the Apate team and are actively exploring product adoption.

Complementary founders with deep expertise in cybersecurity, telecommunications and SaaS

Apate is led by Professor Dali Kaafar (CEO) who has over 10 years of cybersecurity experience as Executive Director of the Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub and was the ex-Research Group Leader, Information Security and Privacy at CSIRO Data61. He also holds a PhD in computer science from Université Côte d'Azur and was instrumental in designing the core conversational AI infrastructure behind Apate. The inspiration for Apate came when Dali was called by a scammer, and for a bit of fun, he decided to keep the scammer on the line to deceive them and waste their time for over 44 minutes (in effect diverting them from scamming others).

Dali is joined by Peter Eckermann (COO) and Brad Joffe (CCO) to round out the rest of the founding team.

Pete has over 15 years of finance and cybersecurity experience as an Industry Principal at the Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub and held various finance roles at TAFE NSW, Institute of Applied Technology, University of Newcastle, BHP and PwC.

Brad has over 15 years of commercial and operational roles as ex-General Manager at Earnd (acquired by Wagestream and later Humanforce). He was also a Director at OurCrowd and corporate lawyer at Addisons and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

We are stoked to be backing Dali, Pete and Brad as they look to create a global category-defining company at the intersection of cybersecurity and AI!