Reality Defender, a new company focusing on identifying deepfake and AI-generated content, has raised $33 million in its first round of funding.
According to Security Week, the funding round involved investments from a variety of supporters, including Illuminate Financial, Booz Allen Ventures, IBM Ventures, the Jeffries Family Office, Accenture, DCVC, and The Partnership Fund for New York City.
Reality Defender is leading the way in creating technologies that aim to reduce the risks associated with synthetic media. These risks include fraud, misinformation, and identity impersonation, which create significant challenges for the accuracy of information in various industries, especially in financial services.
Established in 2021, the company has developed a powerful multi-model, multimodal technology capable of identifying AI-generated content on a large scale. This innovative solution works across different types of media, such as audio, video, images, and text, addressing concerns at the enterprise level about the manipulation of synthetic media.
The new funding will be used to enhance the company’s technological capabilities and extend its operations to the financial sector. This expansion is intended to improve the detection and prevention of risks related to deepfake technology that jeopardize the security and dependability of financial information and transactions.
Additionally, Reality Defender highlighted research from Accenture’s Cyber Intelligence team, which reveals an alarming trend: threat actors are increasingly willing to invest significant amounts in more advanced deepfake technologies, with costs for high-quality videos reaching up to $20,000 per minute. Furthermore, the company pointed out a remarkable 223% increase in the trade of deepfake-related tools on major dark web forums from Q1 2023 to Q1 2024, highlighting the growing market for these malicious technologies.