Tarini Padmanabhuni founded DetectifAI after a deepfake voice call convinced her grandfather he was speaking to his kidnapped brother. The grandfather paid a ransom before learning the call was fake. Padmanabhuni said the lasting impact was that her grandfather had no way to recognize the voice as artificial. The FBI reports Americans lost close to $900 million to AI-driven scams last year, up 24% from 2024, with people 60 and older losing twice as much as those in their 50s.
DetectifAI's approach differs from existing deepfake detection from companies like Reality Defender, Pindrop, and Microsoft. Those products run in the cloud, which Padmanabhuni says makes them hard for phone makers to build into devices. DetectifAI instead designs compact AI models that run inside a smartphone's operating system, providing an instant verdict on whether audio is AI-generated without sending the audio off the device. The company is licensing its SDK first to phone manufacturers, with a secondary revenue stream from businesses and fraud-prevention firms.
The startup already has early revenue, handling more than 100,000 calls a month for financial institutions in India, where AI voice agents handle debt collection and loan follow-ups. DetectifAI has raised a small seed amount from investors including former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine and Manohar Kamath. It is also set to compete in TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield at Disrupt in October.