Pune News
Pune Inc: Meet the 3 Entrepreneurs Battling Deepfakes with Homegrown AI Innovation
In January 2024, a shocking scam rattled the world. During an online meeting of a Hong Kong-based company, a finance employee authorized 15 cash transfers totaling $25.5 million for an urgent acquisition. The shocking truth? The employee was the only real person present—the rest, including the Chief Financial Officer, were AI-generated deepfakes.To combat such sophisticated crimes, pi-labs, a Pune-based startup, was founded in 2023 by Ankush Tiwari, Abhijeet Zilpelwar, and Dr. Raghu Sesha Iyengar. The founders and their team bring over 20 years of experience working together across various environments. Their office is strategically located in Aundh, right above a heavily guarded jewellery showroom—symbolic of their mission to protect valuable assets from digital threats.
Each week, the team rigorously evaluates products, opportunities, and emerging threats, positioning themselves as digital security guards against AI-powered deception gangs.Ankush Tiwari, CEO of pi-labs, highlights the scale of the problem facing India:
“India is digitally savvy with one of the world’s most advanced financial systems. Video KYC is a key feature, but
deepfake technology can now bypass this by mimicking individuals with strong credit profiles. Even government initiatives like the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana could be vulnerable. Deepfakes can effectively resurrect ‘dead’ identities for months during paperwork processing, enabling massive financial fraud.”Tiwari also points to risks in corporate hiring:
“Online recruitment interviews can be compromised if an incompetent candidate uses a deepfake to impersonate an expert. Even a small percentage of such cases could lead to direct financial losses, customer dissatisfaction, and reputational damage.”Law enforcement and defense sectors face their own challenges with AI-driven scams, such as voice cloning and misinformation campaigns.
“The question is how to separate real threats from noise and protect the country,” Tiwari explains.Coming from an Army background, Tiwari is driven by a conviction that while deepfake crimes will grow exponentially, they are preventable. Pi-labs has developed Authentify, an AI++ powered deepfake detection platform capable of verifying the authenticity of videos, audio, images, and voice cloning.“Authentify can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud, offering organizations flexibility and top-tier data confidentiality. It’s designed to tackle evolving deepfake threats and safeguard enterprises’ digital assets,” says Tiwari.Currently, pi-labs primarily serves law enforcement agencies and the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sector, standing at the forefront of the battle against AI-driven digital fraud.
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