Outtake raises $40M Series B to fight AI-driven impersonation and fraud at internet scale

Made it. Alex, what's going on? How we doing, guys?

Great to see you. Great to see you as well. Excited to be back.

It's been a minute since we caught up. Uh,

almost a year, guys. Yeah,

I know. I know. Uh, what's, uh, give us the latest.

Oh, man. Well, we're excited to be here because we're announcing our $40 million series B. So,

let's [ __ ] go.

Let's go. [laughter] Let's go.

Yeah. It's been a it's it's it's been a crazy 12 months for us. I mean we frankly if you if you just look at what's happening in our space it the the the the number of impersonations scams fraud uh has frankly exploded. Um the the number of people that are tackling that in an effective way has not exploded. Uh and so Outtake is increasingly like the one-stop shop for uh I'm proud to say not just uh enterprise but government as well at this point.

Amazing. Yeah. re reintroduce the company like what are because there's there's uh there's so many different problems that you're tackling and and I'd love to uh help people understand like how you guys are approaching it in different verticals and for different customer types.

Yeah, 100%. I I think the oneline abstract version of outtake uh is our job is to make fake things on the internet very expensive and make the real things very obvious. And so what that means for enterprises or governments that we work with uh all these institutions have public surface areas where they represent themselves. Right? If if you're if you're a commercial bank, you have a website, an app, ads you run in ad libraries, employees in public directories, all of these are surface areas that you use to communicate with the world. Um bad actors know that. They try to man in the middle and effectively try to take over those communications, attack you, attack your employees, attack your customers. Our job is to go find that fake uh fake content, remove it as fast as possible and make sure that you remain sort of a high digital trust institution.

Yeah, we we had Peter on from uh Multibbot yesterday and he's had so many issues in the last part of it. He was like doing a really haphazard rebrand with not a lot of planning and had issues with I think his GitHub uh account getting taken over as well as an X account.

Yeah, like as soon as he stepped off the account handle, someone else sniped it

using a bot. Yeah, using a bot. Yeah,

it was like superhuman speed. I I I think that's you guys are touching on exactly the right thing there where it's like, you know, cyber used to be this thing where you're like prepping for the attack and you're like, "Okay, I know like as an institution I'm gonna I'm going to get popped, you know, once a year, once a quarter. It's my job to sort of reduce the blast radius." And so it was really about building these like insanely powerful walls, right? That's not that's that's no longer the attacker uh/defense paradigm anymore. Like you're just under attack at all times. Like you are constantly under siege. like you should pattern match more with uh a virtual drone swarm where yes, the bot will snipe your uh handle the minute that you let it go. Uh it's not that someone's going to think about it threequarters later. Uh and so that's kind of the fundamental shift in cyber right now where the economics of attack have sort of gone to zero. Uh obviously uh defenders need to adapt. uh talk about how you guys are because you guys have customers and you're kind of you're basically monitoring the situation for them on the internet. Uh it's it's monitoring as a service. Uh but also the like takeown element. Talk about the kind of partnerships that you're needing to do your work with individual platforms. Let's say somebody sets up uh a fake account for for Joe Rogan and they're selling like supplements through that account trying to make it look real using AI. Joe Rogan,

uh you can you can report these things. Sometimes there's a lag. talk about like speeding up that process because part of part of what will make this what you said like expensive to be fake on the internet is if things get taken down far far faster which means like machine on one side coordinating with machine from the platform to make it so that you know you're not uh running an an AI ad of Joe Rogan for like 10 days before it gets taken down.

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. like the KPI that I think about as a northstar for outtake is how do I reduce the ROI for a digital criminal, right? And and and you you kind of hit the nail on the head of the way you reduce uh that ROI is how long can their attack be active? If it's if it's fleeting, then they put in a lot of effort to put something together uh or maybe not too much effort with Genai. Uh but but if it's taken down before they get any reward, then then Outtake is doing a job. Um, and and you touched on another really important thing, especially in a in a world of like vibe coding. Something that I like to say a lot is is is Outtake as a company that you cannot vibe code, right? Like you you can sure you can start to put together the capabilities to try to search a little bit. Um uh but to be able to search in depth with highquality classification across all these platforms, you know, whether it's social media, clear web, dark web, you know, forums, Telegram groups, areas that are really hard to get into uh and actually extract what you need at scale and detect what you need at scale. Incredibly difficult. But even more important and certainly not even frankly a thing that that software fully solves on its own is the capability to be a high trust partner to all these sort of uh counterparties, right? where you just mentioned when we go and report something it's really important that whether that's a social media platform or a domain registar they know that outtake as a high trust institution has vetted that report is is high confidence by the way that we the way we provide that confidence is we use our agents to basically go do cyber security investigations on absolutely every single thing we report we did by the way 20 million last year um and

20 million investigations you mean

yeah that's like try to try to comprehend you know how many how many humans that would have taken by the way and also to show you a sense for sort of scale and speed um of that 20 million about 80 to 90% of them happened in just Q4 for us right which you know for us ends this month and so that's like 18 million 17 million of those investigations are happening sort of just in the last three to four months so maybe that gives a sense for like how much we're investigating how much more we're investigating sort of uh as a company at the moment And somebody might ask why why is this not happening at the platform level? Like why wouldn't Meta do this or Google do this or X or Tik Tok? And

uh maybe break down why you need a third party because of kind of the I can imagine there's a really big like incentive misalignment where like if you're if you're Joe Rogan, you don't want somebody popping up in an AI account selling supplements using your name and likeness. But Meta is sitting there being like, "Well, we want more account growth and we want more ad spend on the platform." Like, yes, this is a problem we're trying to handle, but it's not even top of the list, I imagine, because it's like driving usage. It's driving new content, it's driving revenue.

I I I Yes, I think you're pushing at a really important point here. I the, you know, now working with a lot of these platforms, I I think I have a lot more sympathy for them than I might have at the beginning. I might have I might have said, "Yeah, I I you know, like there's not enough people that care about this. I would actually tell you having worked with a lot of these teams, they they care deeply. I think their problem um is is is is the scale at which they work, right? So these platforms are trying to ensure and by the way I think rightly so ensure that they don't infringe on free speech um and they they they they don't unfairly punish people. They don't put too many guard rails on on the one hand. On the other hand, of course, they want to prevent all these problems that we're discussing. And so outake has this unfair advantage frankly where we're not trying to do this at the scale of 3 billion 6 billion people at least not today yet right uh where what we're able to do is say hey we're working with uh the best-in-class sort of fortune 2000 institutions uh the federal government state and local agencies um which is a much much smaller set of institutions and so our models are actually quite fine-tuned to say okay for this specific institution like what is real what is not by the way risk is different for all these institutions, not only between the institutions, but within the institution. Let's say you're talking about again a commercial bank. The way that it assesses risk on social platforms is quite different than the way it assesses it on on websites. And so you almost want like distinct models that are fine-tuned for different surface areas. All that to say, you want to be hyper specific on how you classify risk. Um, and that's a that's a very very hard thing to do at the scale of these these massive platforms. I think that's actually the fundamental issue. It's it's really just a tech scale question for them. What do you think might change on the consumer side? I I saw an Instagram reel of someone highlighting uh just an AI video and he was sort of pushing for a digital ID or some integration with his social security number. There's obviously the world coin world labs project eyeball scanning. There's different things that you can build trust. Jordy likes to if he finds an Instagram profile just scroll back and make sure that they were posting in 2017 before AI existed so that they could uh so so you can see okay well it looks like the same person probably a real person. Um what what do you think is going to change on the consumer side of like proving your identity online?

Uh you you touched on a few really interesting things there. So so one uh Jordy that that's great. That's actually one of the signals we use Sure.

for our agents to sort of check like you know what is the history of this profile? Um um the the you mentioned world. So you know we we actually have a direct partnership with world ID. Uh we actually had uh launched uh I would say a a research experiment project with them called verify where we took uh what they sort of built where as you pointed out um scan the iris give you a a unique way to prove that you are a a singular and unique human. Um and and and and what we were really curious about is like what does that mean for obviously consumer um which by the way I think it means a lot of things. They're doing a lot of incredible work with uh platforms like Tinder for example where it's like hey I want to make sure I date real humans. Um though frankly you know side note it seems like AI dating is also doing quite well. So so maybe there's a gen general market for that as well.

Our chat Ryan in our chat just said TBPN wasn't posting before AI.

Not true. Look at my YouTube channel. I started in 2020. [laughter] My my favorite.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

Um

Yeah. Sorry.

All that to say, um those kinds of consumer credentials actually can and will bubble into enterprise workflows. Um something that that Outtake did was say, okay, um you know, wouldn't it be powerful if if if you could project your security? And and I'll I'll define what that means. uh right now when you when when we interact with other institutions, you actually don't know if that institution, you know, has a great security protocol. Um, one way they could prove that to you is every email they send, they would cryptographically sign, right? Um, and so there would literally be in the header a signature that says like, hey, at the moment of send, I literally swiped my pass key that we all have on our computers. Um, and and and it was physically me and and I can show you with a badge that that this was therefore definitively me, the human, etc., etc. And I'm projecting to you that I'm a high trust person to email with.

Um, and so something that that Outtake is very actively exploring when I talk about uh, you know, making real things obvious as part of our mission is exactly that layer. It's like, okay, how do you go beyond just finding and removing things, but how do you help authenticate and prove to the world what is real? I I think frankly that's like when when when we think about our $40 million series B and and like why I think we're on this trajectory to be a public market company is it's it's the the the real prize the the the real prize for us is like how do you become a trust layer for the internet like how do you say hey we've spent so much time mapping the landscape removing what's fake that actually we are the best source of truth on what's real right um that that's really what we think about

amazing well I will

who who did the who did the round Um, yeah. On a more serious note, uh, who did the round? No, I'm kidding. Uh, very, very iconic group to get in the mix. And I'm sure you'll be back. I I I don't know. If I was a bet, if I was a betting man, I'd say a couple more times this year with the momentum that uh that you guys are on. So, uh, congrats on the on the milestone and uh and uh yeah, thanks thanks for fighting the bad guys.

We'll see you soon.

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