After a deepfake voice fooled her grandfather, this founder sprang into action
After her grandfather was scammed by a deepfake of his brother's voice, Tarini Padmanabhuni founded DetectifAI, a San Francisco startup building AI models small enough to run directly on smartphones and flag fake voices in real time, and it's now one of the companies competing in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt.
When a call came, Tarini Padmanabhuni’s grandfather thought he was talking to his brother. The voice said his brother had been kidnapped and the only way to get him back was to pay a ransom. He paid the ransom, but later learned his brother was nowhere near the situation. What she remembered wasn’t the money, she says – it was that her grandfather had no way of knowing the truth.
That happened two years ago. Today, she founded DetectifAI, a San Francisco-based company aiming to prevent others from being tricked in the same way. Deepfake voice scams are a growing problem, with Americans losing nearly $900 million to AI-driven scams last year, up 24% from 2024. Older people lost even more money. While many companies are developing detection products, DetectifAI’s advantage is its compact AI models that can run directly on a smartphone’s operating system, providing instant results without sending audio to remote servers.
The startup plans to license its software to phone manufacturers, aiming for it to become a standard feature like camera resolution. DetectifAI already handles over 100,000 calls a month for financial institutions in India, protecting against AI voice scams during debt collections and loan follow-ups. Founded by a machine learning enthusiast who started coding at 12, DetectifAI is seeking early revenue and investors, including Josh Constine and Manohar Kamath, to further develop their deepfake detection technology.
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