Key Takeaways
- Doppel is a startup using its own AI agents to fight AI-driven online fraud like fake websites, accounts, and malicious ads.
- The company recently raised $35 million, bringing its total funding to $55.5 million and its valuation to $205 million.
- Doppel’s AI systems scan 100 million potential threats daily, identifying real ones with about 90% accuracy.
- The company switched from human reviewers to AI agents, finding AI more scalable and effective at spotting complex threats.
- Customers like Notion have used Doppel to successfully reduce fraudulent attacks targeting their brand and users.
- AI is making it easier for criminals to launch sophisticated scams, increasing the need for advanced defense solutions.
To combat the rise of artificial intelligence-powered fraud, Kevin Tian believes the solution is simple: use AI to fight AI.
In 2022, Tian co-founded Doppel, a startup dedicated to defending against social engineering attacks. As cybercriminals increasingly use advanced AI to boost their scams, Doppel deploys its own AI systems to counteract them swiftly and effectively.
Doppel uses specialized AI agents—software designed to perform tasks automatically. These agents constantly scan the internet, dark web, and social media platforms for suspicious activity.
They flag everything from copycat websites and fake social media accounts to malware-spreading ads on popular platforms like Google, Instagram, and YouTube.
Every day, Doppel’s agents sift through around 100 million potential phishing alerts. They separate genuine threats from false alarms with roughly 90% accuracy and report malicious content for removal, according to Tian.
“If threat actors can use AI to spin up these attacks for just a few cents on the dollar, we’ve got to make sure that we can also handle that volume on our side,” Tian explained in an interview with Forbes.
The company recently announced $35 million in new funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. This brings Doppel’s total venture backing to $55.5 million and values the startup at $205 million.
Tian started the company with CTO Rahul Madduluri, whom he met while working on Uber’s flying car project. Initially focused on NFT fraud, Doppel expanded its services to other industries in 2023.
Previously, Doppel relied on human contractors to manually review potential threats. However, discovering that advanced AI models could perform these tasks more efficiently, the company replaced its human team with AI agents.
This shift automated about 30% of security operations. Tian noted that the AI agents have proven better at identifying threats than humans, transforming the business.
“It’s just not scalable to have a human team review those millions of alerts every single day and we now have an AI agent that can make those decisions,” Tian said.
Productivity software company Notion faced a surge in attacks, including malicious ads and social media accounts impersonating its CEO. Scammers even cloned their download page to trick users.
Notion turned to Doppel for help. The AI agents quickly identified and took down thousands of fraudulent campaigns, making attacks against Notion far less frequent and more costly for the scammers, according to Notion’s head of platform security, Daniel Pyykonen.
Doppel utilizes a “threat graph” to map connections between various elements of fraud campaigns, like phone numbers and IP addresses. This helps track hackers using AI and protect businesses more proactively.
The goal, Tian explained, is to move beyond simply reacting to individual threats and instead dismantle entire malicious operations.
Doppel reports having around 180 enterprise clients, including major names like United Airlines, OpenAI, and Coinbase, and claims its revenue tripled year over year. It’s also serving clients in finance, insurance, and oil and gas.
Artificial intelligence has significantly lowered the bar for cybercriminals, enabling more sophisticated social engineering attacks beyond simple phishing emails.
These now include tactics like fake messages from impersonated executives asking for money, fake professional profiles seeking private data, and highly convincing counterfeit websites.
The scale is immense. Google recently suspended 40 million malicious advertiser accounts, many using AI-generated content. Microsoft reported blocking fraud attempts that could have cost customers $4 billion in a single year.
Tian sees the current situation mirrored in movies like Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, where a rogue AI distorts reality. He views Doppel as a crucial player in tackling “one of the biggest problems in the world today, which is AI enabled social engineering.”
