Reality Defender, a New York startup working on technology to detect deepfake and AI-generated media, has bagged $33 million in new capital to expand the business into the financial sector.
The expanded Series A financing was provided by Illuminate Financial, Booz Allen Ventures, IBM Ventures, the Jeffries Family Office, Accenture, DCVC, and The Partnership Fund for New York City.
Reality Defender is building technology to address enterprise concerns over synthetic media manipulation, which introduces risks and costs to organizations through fraud, misinformation, and identity spoofing.
Founded in 2021, the company said its multi-model, multimodal solutions can detect AI-generated content at scale across audio, video, images, and text.
The company cited data from Accenture’s Cyber Intelligence researchers that show threat actors are willing to spend more for higher quality deepfakes, with prices reaching up to $20,000 per minute for high quality videos.
In addition, Reality Defender said researchers have noted a 223% increase from Q1 2023 compared to Q1 2024 in the purchasing and selling of deepfake-related tools in major dark web forums.
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