Deduce nets $9M investment to scale synthetic identity fraud prevention service

Investors have been betting heavily on generative AI, so it should come as no surprise that big money is also flowing into the project of preventing its misuse to build synthetic identities. U.S. anti-fraud firm Deduce has announced $9 million in Series B funding, led by Freestyle Capital and supported by Foundry and True Ventures.

The significant investment will allow Deduce to move its AI digital identity fraud prevention product out of stealth and into the hands of businesses in need of ways to combat nefarious uses of generative AI and large language models, at scale.

In a release, the CEO of Deduce, Ari Jacoby, said that threats to private biometric data and online safety are at an unprecedented level due to the pace at which AI is progressing, and that “legacy fraud prevention methods will no longer be able to protect us from AI-generated fraud.” The Philadelphia-based company was founded in 2019 with the goal of developing technology that could prove more effective.

“We know the rapid adoption of generative AI will enable bad actors to use new technologies to perpetrate fraud,” said Jenny Lefcourt of Freestyle Capital. “Deduce has built a proprietary solution to tackle this new type of threat, so our decision to invest in scaling that solution was simple.”

Deduce trains its technology to weed out what it calls SuperSynthetic identities — “AI-generated identities so realistic they fool legacy fraud solutions.” Deepfakes, fabricated transactional histories, stolen biometrics and other fraud tactics have made it easier to create false identities that are extremely difficult to distinguish from legitimate ones.

Deduce starts from the premise stated on its website: “Evaluating an online identity in the context of millions of other identities and across trillions of identity attributes is the only way to detect sophisticated AI-generated fraud.” Its fraud-detection measures identify digital forensics patterns that appear to have been generated by AI, checked against the world’s largest purpose-built, activity-backed digital identity graph, encompassing 840 million U.S.-based email identities and more than 150,000 websites and apps.

Deduce’s AI-fraud-fighting product is available through Experian, ForgeRock, Auth0, and Ping Identity.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  Deduce  |  digital identity  |  fraud prevention  |  funding  |  synthetic identity fraud