A new smartphone app launched July 7, 2026, aims to protect people from scam calls that use artificial intelligence to imitate family members. The scam typically works like this: a caller uses fake audio to impersonate your child or relative, claims they've been kidnapped or arrested, and demands immediate payment. The technology to do this has become cheap and easy — attackers now need only a few seconds of someone's real voice to create a convincing fake TechCrunch.

The company behind the app, Savi Security, raised $7 million from investors including Acrew Capital, Magnify Ventures, and others TechCrunch.

Savi was founded by two brothers: Patrick and Ryan Coughlin. Patrick worked in security at Cisco, one of the world's largest tech companies, and previously started a company called TruSTAR that Splunk bought in 2021 for roughly $82 million. Ryan worked at Apple and Spotify on products that millions of people use every day TechCrunch.

What sparked the idea: a scammer used a fake voice to target their own mother. That experience drove home how vulnerable ordinary people are to these calls.

The brothers bring two different kinds of expertise. Patrick knows how big companies protect themselves against threats — detecting when something is suspicious and stopping it. Ryan knows how to build products that everyday people can actually use. The challenge Savi faces is taking the sophisticated security techniques used in corporate offices and making them work for a person receiving a terrifying phone call, not a trained professional looking at a screen full of alerts.

Fake voice technology is not new, but it has gotten much better and much cheaper. Law enforcement has been warning about kidnapping scams using cloned voices since 2023. As the technology improves, these fake calls sound more and more like the real thing.

You may already have some protection: your phone carrier blocks some spam calls, and both iPhone and Android have call-screening features built in. But those tools catch traditional spam and robocalls, not voices that sound like your family. Savi is building something more specialized — a detector for AI-generated voices and videos specifically.

Here's what matters most: for this app to work, it needs to catch fake calls without raising too many false alarms. If it flags a legitimate family emergency as fraud, that could be catastrophic. But if it misses a real scam, you could lose money or worse. Getting that balance right while the call is happening is the real test.