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Why We Invested in Doppel

January 23, 2024

Digital Risk Protection for the Modern Information Warfare Battle Space

Late in 2023 we met Doppel's Co-Founder and CEO Kevin Tian at an influential Washington, D.C. technology conference. Kevin and his Co-Founder and CTO, Rahul Madduluri, met as software engineers at Uber where they worked on everything from Uber's complex matching, surge, and shared rides algorithms, to Uber Copter. Already passionate about the need to build better technology to counter cyber enabled information warfare, our team at Strategic Cyber Ventures was blown away by the progress Doppel had made in just 14 months since forming the company. We were ecstatic about the prospect of working with them. The need to monitor and defend every digital channel on the modern battlefield at machine speed has become imperative for both national and corporate security.

One prime example, the rapid rise and sophistication of impersonation attacks targeting brands, companies, high-profile individuals, and our nation had become front page news. By mid 2023 attackers were widely leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to impersonate whoever or whatever is required to conduct phishing attacks, run scams, hawk counterfeit digital assets, and to sow dissent and distrust by any means necessary. Propelled by massive advances in AI, 2024 is expected to be a banner year for first of their kind cyber and information warfare campaigns.

Deep Fake of Taylor Swift and the Coach of Kansas City Chiefs, Andy Reid

Examples of these attacks include prominent individuals in finance impersonated in order to run phishing and pump-and-dump scams targeting retail investors. These attacks are just one example of the type of advanced attacks we must prepare for in an AI supercharged cyber threat world.

A screenshot of a social media account

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Larry Fink Fake Social Media Profile

With the 2024 election season heating up, we can expect a massive increase in impersonation attempts of presidential candidates and other key societal influencers. The number of potential high value target events for threat actors to influence this year at the local, corporate, and the national level is staggering.

As well as realistic AI-generated images:

A person and child playing with a basketball

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Deep Fake of Donald Trump

Keeping up with the speed of the threat

Doppel helps protect and defend brand reputation and digital networks from complex problems like these and many others by pulling data from domain registrars, social media apps, app stores, digital marketplaces, the dark web, and countless platforms across the internet by using computer vision and AI to synthesize, identify, and remove these threats in real time. Doppel scans over 10M URLs, 100K social media accounts, and 100K applications with customers such as Meta, ARK Invest, and Coinbase to name a few.

Doppel's technology platform is perfect for monitoring and countering threats in the dynamic, AI driven, information and cyber warfare environment of 2024 and beyond.

We're extremely excited to partner with Kevin and Rahul as a part of their Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).


Want to learn more about Doppel? Book a demo here.


ABOUT STRATEGIC CYBER VENTURES

Cybersecurity is national security, and we are a D.C.-based venture capital firm on a mission to find cutting-edge startups that help us make an impact. We go beyond the check to help our founders win by leveraging our industry connections and experience as cybersecurity veterans to fuel their companies from inception to exit.

To learn more about our investment strategy and portfolio, explore www.scvgroup.com or connect with us on Twitter @SCV_Cyber to be part of our mission in shaping the future of cybersecurity.