Her grandfather paid a ransom to a cloned voice: she builds a detector that spins in the phone

Tarini Padmanabhuni founded DetectifAI after a fake hostage-taking by synthetic voice. His start-up already handles more than 100,000 calls per month for Indian banks.

Tarini Padmanabhuni's grandfather received a call in a voice he recognized as his brother's, announcing a hostage-taking. He paid the ransom before discovering that the caller did not exist: the voice had been generated by AI. What struck her, she explains, was not the amount lost but the complete lack of a way to verify anything at the time of the call.

Its answer is DetectifAI, a San Francisco-based company that trains detection models compact enough to run directly in the phone's operating system. The analysis is therefore done locally and in real time, without the audio of the conversation going to a remote server — a choice that addresses both latency and privacy. The start-up is funded by Josh Constine, former TechCrunch editor, and Manohar Kamath, and already generates revenue by processing more than 100,000 monthly calls for financial institutions in India.

The scale of the phenomenon justifies the urgency: the FBI estimates that Americans lost nearly $900 million to voice scams over the last year recorded, up 24% compared to 2024.