Nikolai Vogler is Co-Founder at BeeSafe AI, a Y Combinator-backed fraud prevention platform that stops trust-based scams before they reach customers. BeeSafe uses AI agents to engage with scammers in real-time, extracting actionable intelligence to help financial services and government agencies intercept fraud.

Nikolai earned his Master's degree at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, where he was advised by Graham Neubig and supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He is currently a PhD student at UC San Diego studying machine learning and natural language processing under Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick.

Nikolai has over 10 years of experience in ML and NLP, with research on novel transformer architectures, training objectives, and evaluation benchmarks for reasoning. He co-authored the pioneering research paper introducing the first AI system for engaging sophisticated, trust-based scammers.

BeeSafe AI has already enabled financial services and government agencies to intercept scammers mid-transaction and prevent victim losses. The company received $305,000 in SBIR funding and is part of Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch.

The three PhD founders combine deep expertise in AI and security to tackle the $12 billion trust-based scam problem, including pig butchering and impersonation attacks. BeeSafe won the DOD Cyber Competition and is scaling its platform to protect customers across financial services, crypto, telecommunications, and government agencies.