Businesses are more frequently becoming targets of AI impersonation fraud. A new company has secured $28 million in funding to combat deepfakes instantly.

Twelve months on, this is precisely the situation unfolding: The Identity Theft Resource Center documented a 148% increase in impersonation fraud from April 2024 to March 2025, fueled by fraudsters establishing fraudulent company sites, utilizing realistic AI conversational agents, and creating voice systems that are indistinguishable from actual corporate spokespeople. During 2024, the Federal Trade Commission logged $2.95 billion in financial setbacks linked to impersonation schemes.

A new startup is now entering the arena. Imper.AI intends to prevent AI impersonation attempts instantaneously, and has just declared its public debut along with $28 million in fresh capital. Redpoint Ventures and Battery Ventures spearheaded this funding initiative, joined by contributions from Maple VC, Vessy VC, and Cerca Partners.

Rather than attempting to identify visual or audio irregularities, a method that's proving increasingly unfeasible, imper.AI asserts it examines the digital traces that perpetrators are unable to fabricate. These encompass device telemetry (the ambient information your device emits, such as its location, operating system, hardware specifications, and network activity), network diagnostics, and contextual indicators. Its system operates unobtrusively across applications like Zoom, Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, Google Workspace, and IT support settings, identifying hazardous interactions before an individual is misled.

Noam Awadish, the chief executive officer and a former member of Israel's 8200 cyberwarfare unit with prior experience at autonomous-driving innovator Mobileye, stated that artificial intelligence has significantly amplified traditional social-engineering methods. These methods involve tricking individuals into divulging confidential data or authorizing actions that jeopardize security. By employing impersonation, fabricated urgency, or psychological coercion, adversaries are more frequently leveraging AI to deceive targets into disclosing login credentials, financial information, or remote access privileges.

A recent illustration involves Jaguar Land Rover. In the past month, cybercriminals employed counterfeit login details to execute synchronized phishing and “vishing” (voice-phishing) operations, posing as JLR's IT assistance personnel to collect login information and secure unauthorized entry. This breach compelled the automotive manufacturer to halt essential IT infrastructure and, consequently, its manufacturing operations, leading to projected financial damages of $1.5 billion to date. 

Imper.ai’s founding team of Awadish, along with other 8200 veterans Anatoly Blighovsky and Rom Dudkiewicz, believes their background as both cyber attackers and defenders gives them an edge. “I think that people don’t understand that most of the major breaches start with social engineering,” Awadish told me, adding that AI is a game changer because emails, videos, and voice clones have become almost perfect. 

In addition, he pointed out that collaboration tools have multiplied far beyond email and phone calls. Now attackers have dozens of communication tools, and AI lets them generate “spear-phishing” messages (personalized phishing emails) at scale, as well as cloned voices, and deepfake videos at massive speed.

This is why imper.AI refrains from attempting to identify AI impersonation solely based on the AI-produced material. “We don’t want to get into an AI arms race,” Awadish stated. Rather, the new venture concentrates on aspects that adversaries are unable to counterfeit, primarily metadata. 

As the company’s traction has accelerated, so has investor interest. “We want to build a platform that safeguards the entire communication space,” Awadish said. “ It’s not something small, it’s not like a plugin that one of the giants is going to build.” With the new funding, he said that the company can double its R&D headcount and triple its go-to-market organization in the US.  

“At the moment, there is really high traction, so we need to keep up with the pace, so we need to grow,” he said. 

I'm incredibly thrilled about my upcoming trip to San Francisco for Coins2Day Brainstorm AI, scheduled for Monday and Tuesday! I'll be conducting interviews with Prakhar Mehrotra, who holds the position of SVP and global head of AI at PayPal, and Marc Hamilton, VP of solutions architecture and engineering at Nvidia, right on the main stage. Additionally, I'll be leading a lively panel discussion focused entirely on AI data centers. I'm also eager to hear from some of the other presenters, such as actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, and Ali Ghodsi, the CEO of Databricks.

And with that, here’s more AI news.

Sharon Goldman
[email protected]
@sharongoldman

FORTUNE ON AI

Microsoft AI aims for all its personnel to be AI-native by the close of the fiscal year, according to Liz Danzico, VP of design.–by Angelica Ang

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, might be compelled to divest its U.S. Operations, yet its understated progress in artificial intelligence is poised to aid its continued existence and potentially foster growth.–by Nicholas Gordon

Anthropic considers IPO despite warnings that excess liquidity is blowing a bubble in the markets–by Jim Edwards

Sam Altman issues a 'Code Red' alert due to the rapid ascent of Google's Gemini, mirroring a similar reaction from Google CEO Sundar Pichai three years prior following ChatGPT's debut.–by Sharon Goldman

ServiceNow's president stated that the acquisition of the identity and access management platform Veza is intended to assist clients in monitoring the locations of AI agents.—by Jeremy Kahn

AI IN THE NEWS

Legal AI startup Harvey raises $160 million at an $8 billion valuation. Harvey, a rapidly ascending company in the AI legal-tech surge, has secured $160 million, valuing it at $8 billion, as reported by New York Times. This figure more than doubles its worth from February and pushes its total funding for the year to approximately $760 million. The company, established four years ago and currently utilized by nearly half of the Am Law 100 firms, develops AI tools designed to assist legal professionals in creating and examining documents, responding to legal precedent inquiries, and streamlining repetitive tasks. The funding round, spearheaded by Andreessen Horowitz with contributions from T. Rowe Price, WndrCo, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and other investors, indicates that the strong interest from investors in AI solutions for professional sectors persists, despite instability in the wider technology industry.

VC 'kingmaking' is happening earlier than ever with AI startups. AI ERP startup DualEntry raised a $90 million Series A at a $415 million valuation—despite being just a year old—as Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures bet that a next-generation replacement for legacy systems like Oracle NetSuite can scale fast. But according to TechCrunch, the size of the round has revived questions about “kingmaking,” the increasingly common VC tactic of pouring huge sums into a single early-stage company to manufacture category dominance. While one investor told TechCrunch that DualEntry had only around $400,000 in ARR last summer—a figure the company disputes—the aggressive funding mirrors a broader shift: venture firms are picking winners earlier than ever. 

Why does AI write like that? I truly felt compelled to highlight this extensive article from New York Times, which is highly recommended. It posits that writing produced by artificial intelligence has subtly emerged as the primary discourse online—influencing a wide range of content from academic papers to political declarations—with its now-recognizable style of em dashes, ethereal imagery, tricolons, and excessively refined earnestness. The author observes that what's disquieting isn't merely the ubiquity of AI-generated text, but the fact that people are beginning to subconsciously mimic it, establishing a cycle where language cultivated by machines becomes the standard cultural cadence. On a personal note, I'd previously encountered information regarding AI chatbots' fondness for the term "delve,", but I wasn't aware of their predilection for spectral language and all things "quiet": "Everything is a shadow, or a memory, or a whisper. They also love quietness. For no obvious reason, and often against the logic of a narrative, they will describe things as being quiet, or softly humming." 

Microsoft lowers sales staff’s growth targets for newer AI software. Similar to other major technology firms, Microsoft dedicated a significant portion of 2025 to enthusiastically promoting AI agents as the subsequent major advancement in business automation. However, as the year concludes, the company is subtly moderating its projections, based on recent accounts from The Information. Following several sales divisions failing to meet ambitious expansion objectives, Microsoft has eased requirements for specific AI offerings—a notably public admission that established businesses are still reluctant to invest in sophisticated automation. Clients indicate that the return on investment continues to be challenging to quantify and the technology too prone to mistakes for critical operations such as financial management and cybersecurity. Although AI has substantially benefited Microsoft’s cloud division—largely due to substantial investments from OpenAI and robust demand for solutions like Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot—convincing general businesses to substantially boost their AI expenditures is proving considerably more difficult than selling to AI research facilities.

AI CALENDAR

Dec. 2-7: NeurIPS, San Diego.

Dec. 8-9:  Coins2Day Brainstorm AI San Francisco. Apply to attend here.

Jan. 7-10: Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas. 

March 12-18:  SWSW, Austin. 

March 16-19: Nvidia GTC, San Jose. 

April 6-9: HumanX, San Francisco. 

EYE ON AI NUMBERS

221 Million

That's the number of YouTube subscribers drawn to channels labeled as "AI slop", which primarily feature AI-generated material, as reported by a new report from Kapwing, a cloud-based video editing service.