After her grandfather fell victim to a deepfake voice scam involving an AI-generated imitation of his brother's voice—resulting in a ransom demand—Tarini Padmanabhuni founded DetectifAI to help prevent similar deceptions. The problem is substantial and rapidly growing, with Americans losing close to $900 million to AI-driven scams last year, a 24% increase from 2024, with older adults particularly vulnerable.

DetectifAI's distinctive approach is to develop compact AI models designed from the ground up to run directly on smartphones' operating systems, enabling instant detection of deepfake voices during calls without audio leaving the device. The company is licensing its technology primarily to phone manufacturers to integrate detection as a built-in feature, with Padmanabhuni drawing an analogy to AT&T's exclusive partnership in the original iPhone launch. DetectifAI already generates revenue by handling over 100,000 calls monthly for Indian financial institutions, verifying that callers are genuine and detecting AI-generated voices in debt collection and loan follow-up calls.