From M&A Lawyer to AI Founder: How Apate.ai Fights Scammers with AI Agents | Brad Joffe

What happens when your startup gets acquired, then your acquirer collapses a year later? Brad Joffe, co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Apate.ai, has lived it. In this episode of Battle Scars of a SaaS Leader, James Bergl sits down with Brad to trace his career from M&A lawyer to venture capital at OurCrowd. From there he joined the founding team at Earnd, the company that brought earned wage access to Australia. Brad shares the inside story of Earnd's three acquisitions: Greensill Capital during the first COVID lockdown, a two-week rescue out of administration when Greensill collapsed, and moves to Wagestream and Humanforce. Today Brad is building Apate.ai, an AI-powered scam disruption and intelligence platform that started as a Macquarie University research project. Apate deploys armies of conversational AI agents that engage scammers across voice, SMS, WhatsApp, email and the web. The agents waste the scammers' time and extract real-time intelligence for banks, telcos and crypto exchanges, including Commonwealth Bank, Macquarie Bank, TPG Telecom and Capitec. In this episode: Category creation and why competition validates your market Why earned wage access took off faster in the US and UK than in Australia How to evaluate suitors when you're selling a business under pressure How an 18-month-old startup is winning enterprise bank contracts Founder-led sales and when to make your first sales hire Brad's "3 C's" hiring rubric: commitment, competence and curiosity Why data is the real moat for AI companies Predictions on the "SaaS apocalypse" and the future of AI and SaaS #AIstartups #Scams #FraudPrevention #FounderLedSales #SaaS #Cybersecurity #Fintech #StartupAustralia