The proliferation of huge realistic deep strikes is one of the most harmful byproducts of the rise of artificial intelligence, and victims of scams based on these deep strikes have caused losses to the company. Millions of dollars – Not to mention the impact of these on national security. Today, a startup is building a tool set for governments and businesses to help discover and stop deep developments in audio, video and still images and announce some impressive funding for clients and investors.
GetReal – Co-founded by Dr. Hany Farid, one of the pioneers of Deepfake media, has raised $17.5 million in equity that will be used for R&D, recruitment and business development.
In addition to funding, the company will launch its forensic platform as a service, which includes web interfaces, APIs and integrations to run media analytics, as a service. Features include a Threat Exposure Dashboard, a “check” tool specifically designed to maintain high-profile executives, a deception tool, a “protect” tool for “protect” tools, and “response”, a service involving a team of people who getReal for more in-depth analysis.
Cybersecurity and AI expert Forgepoint Capital is leading the Series A with the involvement of Ballistic Venture Capital, Evolution Equity and the K2 Access Fund.
Ballistics is the key company on this list. Getreal starts incubating in venture capital in 2022 until it appears from stealth in June 2024. tonealso includes Venrock, Artisanal, Qudit and Silver Buckshot.
Ballistics matters, and that’s another reason: Ted Schlein, the company’s founder, is the chairman and another co-founder of Getreal. Before ballistics, Schlein led Kleiner Perkins.
Hannie as a service
GetReal is located in the wider world of cybersecurity, especially in the rapidly developing field of cyber law sensitization. The market gap for San Mateo-based startups is addressing the lack of talent and knowledge in the field.
“If you think cybersecurity is lacking, prepare for evidence,” said Getreal CEO Matt Moynahan.
Moynahan himself is not the founder of a startup. When it was still invisible, he arrived Thirty years of career Lead a range of major cybersecurity companies such as Symantec, Arbor Networks, Veracode and Forcepoint.
“I don’t think I’ve seen this ubiquitous threat to be honest,” he said.
By contrast, he described the virus as a “new threat.” “What we’ve seen over the past 20 years is the threat of handing over to end users to end users,” he said. “Let’s create “interesting” applications that make people create deep hits are part of the problem, but so is the environment we work today. “People have gone from bricks and mortar to businesses that are now almost completely digital and in the cloud.”
He continued that phishing proves that even very smart people are easily deceived and all combined together is a complex and very bad signal about where things are going.
Getreal is Farid’s creativity pioneer In the technology of identifying when digital images have been tampered with. It can be argued that Farid understood the risk of deep strike even before the term emerged.
As Farid explained to TechCrunch, while working primarily as an academic and researcher, he has more or less informally applied his knowledge to media organizations, legal teams (after digital images can be accepted in court), and so on. In 2022, he worked with Schlein to think about how to turn it into actual business, turning the investigation process into code.
“No one stares at this way like Hannie,” Moynahan said. “But Hanni can’t scale. So we basically took Hannie and tried to create a ‘Hany Service’ in the cloud.”
Interestingly, Farid notes that while the technology it is developing depends on how the new application works – a lot of reverse engineering is done on GetReal – it combines with decades of knowledge and has changed little over the decades.
“The technologies we developed 20 years ago are still working today,” he said, refusing to explain what they are. “You don’t have to tell others everything we do, but the right thing is complicated.”
Signal effect: text will still come
The Series A announced today also includes some key strategic supporters, including Cisco Investments, Capital One Ventures and IN-Q-TEL Investments, which are closely linked to the CIA.
Alberto Yépez, co-founder of Forgepoint, who leads investment, said the strategic list reflects companies interested in or have begun adopting GetReal products.
Yepas said what he found during his due diligence was that regulated industries, such as financial institutions, were already demanding such products, and that CISO was authorized on the board of directors’ committees.
“They raised this question [of deep faked impersonations] After their CEO was interviewed by voice,” he explained—they were pretended to be themselves and Being deceived by imitation. Named clients include John Deere and Visa.
As for the government’s work, Jepez said: “They also have some priorities in the field.”
These “priorities” include intelligence agencies and government officials being deceived or inactive by fake information from bad actors.
However, they have not yet been extended to text-based imitation.
This is what appeared this week, when the Atlantic editor – Added to signal group chat incorrectly Military attacks were planned in Yemen – initially thought to be a parody scam. Shockingly, this kind of chat turned out to be very real and very contrary to national security procedures.
Farid said the text is not currently in GetReal’s permissions. “This is another wild beast,” he said. But in the long run, the plan will expand over time to include various deep and imitation threats.
