Reality Defender secures new investments, wins innovation challenge

Reality Defender has announced new strategic investments from BNY, Samsung Next and Fusion Fund, supporting continued development in deepfake detection. A release says the collaborations “reinforce the organizations’ commitment to the prevention of deepfake-enabled fraud across critical financial and communication channels.”

Terms of the investments were not disclosed.

Ben Colman, CEO of Reality Defender, says the investments “will allow Reality Defender to scale our technology during a time of heightened deepfake volatility. With their support and alignment with our mission of securing critical communication channels against deepfake impersonations, we can work toward defeating the most advanced fraud attacks and cyber threats of our time.”

The deepfake plague continues to spread, causing havoc with sophisticated fraud. Reality Defender cites numbers from Entrust, which show that a deepfake attempt happened every five minutes in 2024, and that deepfakes now account for 40 percent of all biometric fraud.

“Deepfake technology represents one of the most significant emerging threats to institutional trust in our digital economy,” says Lu Zhang, Founder and Managing Partner of Fusion Fund. “Reality Defender’s pioneering approach to multimodal detection addresses this challenge head-on with technology that not only identifies today’s threats but is engineered to anticipate tomorrow’s attacks. We’re proud to support their mission of securing critical communication channels in an increasingly AI-powered world.”

A new blog from Colman celebrates Reality Defender’s victory alongside PeakMetrics in the 2025 U.S.-Japan Global Innovation Challenge, sponsored by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and Japan’s Ministry of Defense Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Agency (ATLA).

The challenge aims to “advance AI-driven command and control decision-making to strengthen resilience against information warfare.”

Colman says that Reality Defender’s winning joint solution with PeakMetrics “leverages AI-powered narrative intelligence and deepfake detection to enable agencies to defend against foreign malign influence and deceptive media. This capability is essential for maintaining information integrity in an era when AI-manipulated content can undermine trust and compromise national security.”

Colman says the partnership is particularly timely for Japan, which data from Sumsub shows experiencing a whopping 243 percent year-over-year increase in deepfake incidents.

“Our cutting-edge detection capabilities are now positioned to help Japanese defense and intelligence agencies maintain information integrity during this surge. By combining forces with PeakMetrics and gaining this prestigious recognition, Reality Defender is proving that when it comes to defeating sophisticated AI deception, international collaboration isn’t just valuable – it’s essential, as bad actors weaponize AI to attack states, institutions and individuals.”

Article Topics

biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  deepfake detection  |  deepfakes  |  investment  |  PeakMetrics  |  Reality Defender  |  research and development