Aura hits $340M ARR protecting families from identity theft, deepfakes, and AI-powered scams averaging $25K per incident

Speaker 2: with great update for us. How are doing? Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Good to see you. Since this is your first time on the show, would love a an overview of the company and yourself, and then we can go into the actual news.

Speaker 8: Sure. The the company Aura were in the consumer security, consumer safety, space. So basically, we thought about, all the various different ways that, a family could get, impacted by using services online, scam, spam, transaction fraud. Yeah. All the way from that, all the way to making sure that, if you have teenage kids, for example, if they're using devices too much, we have ability to kind of figure out, how best to sort of guide and navigate them around digital detox, etcetera. So,

Speaker 2: yeah, so that's that's the core of the product. And I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. This is my third third company now. So Awesome. How big is the problem? Because now that I'm thinking about it, I mean, we were just at CrowdStrike's Falcon on Tuesday, and we heard that phishing open rates phishing email open rates have jumped from 12 to something like 60% in the AI era. And when I actually go back to the number of cybersecurity scams, I have just as many examples of friends who thought that their grandmother was asking for gift cards as I do in a corporate setting. And so how how prevalent is this? What are the what what's the data that you monitor to understand the scope of the problem?

Speaker 8: Look. I I think that over the years, both the breadth of the problem and sort of the number of people it impacts has gotten, like, astronomically bigger, basically, where certain scams used to be, I don't know, a few thousand dollars worth of scams. Now we see that's gone up to, like, $25,000 per scam on average. The incidence rate is quite high because now that there are a lot more AI based tools, the bad actors also use the same tools to do deepfakes, to do ID theft with a lot more data out in the dark web that ends up becoming a precursor to basically being able to use that to, do nefarious things to families. And I think the the other big thing is, if you thought about kids, where when I was growing up, we weren't native to phones and native to online services. My kids, I mean, they are digital natives, so they basically, you know, are on their devices all day long, which means the incidence of them putting information out there is just much higher. And so as a result, there's just more and more and more of this happening, which is pretty scary.

Speaker 1: Talk about the recent hack, leak. There was some ID verification service that had a breach. And I think from what I could see, it seemed like half the people in The US were impacted, something like that with with their now, you know, image of their ID out on But the break break down the the breach and then and then what people should do.

Speaker 8: Yeah. Look, I think, you know, starting with even a couple years ago, there's the NPD breach, the national, the the the the national levels or Social Security number, etcetera. Now there's a lot more ID, digital image theft, etcetera. I think the the key thing I would say is the incidence of these is is so high now that when people hear about it, you just start kinda immunized. Like, you're like, okay, well, whatever. Like, know, I'm sure my data's already out there. What's going through people's minds. The the trouble with it is this is just an early tell for the next set of things that are going to start happening. So for example, at Aura, we have a fully trained foundation model that is looking at sequences of stuff, right? You know, hey, like, what's the first thing that happens, and what's the second thing that happens, what's the third thing that happens, and how can you sort of, analyze risk with with systems? And we see that, with, data breaches and information getting out in the dark web is a pretty early and good tell. If it's happened multiple times, you see that the incidence of actual identity theft, is bad at the back end. So the the the very tangible things I'd say, you know, monitor your credit, make sure that you're looking at your credit card numbers and statements. Don't wait for the whole statement to show up. You start seeing, odd things on physical mail, like, you know, keep an eye out for that as well. We've had even, you know, weird situations where people have stolen information, and, you know, it it gets sold to folks, for physical crimes as well. So we see a lot more intersection of physical and digital happening a lot more these days as well. So Interesting. What what is the

Speaker 2: what is the industry side of the business look like? Like, I imagine that as you're protecting homes, schools, individuals, identity theft, there's the flip side, which is if I'm a business, I don't want someone purchasing with a stolen identity, and having a clear communication line between those two parties probably makes sense. But what does that actually look like in practice?

Speaker 8: I mean, I think that's a great question. Right? Because if you thought if you thought about your own life, like, as or or me, the surfaces I spend time on are my home, my workplace, and a parent, as a parent at the way my kids' school. Yeah. So there's a lot of data that kinda goes across, that stack. And even more than just, you know, are you using a nefarious card for, you know, for purchasing something from me? Even more basic than that is a lot of the enterprise scams, like the the the ones you were talking about, even with Falcon, for example, many of those originate on the consumer side, and many of the breaches that happen on the enterprise side is social engineering attacks anymore, right? So it's basically going through people who are employees Yeah. And then kinda using that to get into the enterprise. So on both those pieces, I think getting the, consumer to be more aware of these issues ends up becoming pretty critical. We see a lot more overlap now where, you know, we we do sell our product through large enterprises as well, and so we talk to a lot of sisters of big companies, and the the the feedback we get is, look, the lines are very blurred between what's at home, what's at work. And so even even besides sort of the loss prevention piece of it, which is, hey. You use a fake credit card to buy a product. It's even more imminent that they wanna make sure their enterprises are kept safe, and sometimes, you know, keeping employees safe is the best way to do that. Yeah. Yeah. How much time do you spend

Speaker 2: working on streamlining onboarding? When I think about these security products, we've talked to the CEO of 1Password, a fantastic product, but onboarding can be like a stumbling block for people that want to secure their life, secure their identity, but the actual integration of getting deep into all the accounts, collecting everything, making sure that everything's set up properly, that can be a hurdle. I imagine you have low churn, but the conversion to, I heard about this, to actually I'm using it properly, has gotta be a hurdle. How much how how how much are you focused on that?

Speaker 8: We spend a lot of time on that. Time to value is a huge metric for us, which is, you know, how how quickly can you get the customer to something of value, basically. But I'll say two things. One is on the way that the industry works today, if you thought about a product you bought, you know, for for either of you guys, right, it's gonna look the same. Like, you buy, something that's gonna keep your identity safe or you, buy something to keep your passwords locked up or even something for kids, for example, the solution doesn't really understand or know you. It knows the problem, right? And so one of the things we have done, which is very different, is we're probably the only product that puts the actual family at the center. So there's actually a large sort of family graph that maps out all of the relationships for people. Who are you? You know, who are the people that you sort of, you know, connect with? And then all of the reasoning and the inference systems that we run on top of that have good ability to have a view of you end to end, means which that when you go into onboarding, we can do a better job first getting you onboard, and then as we're watching and observing, we wanna make sure that that, you know, you it's it's very personalized for you and your digital footprint.

Speaker 1: We have a a massive Gong here. Any any recent revenue milestones or growth growth milestones you could share that we could use to hit this Gong for you?

Speaker 8: Oh, yeah. Sure. We we hit we're about 340 some odd million of ARRs. Woah. There it is. So that's the congratulations. Thank

Speaker 2: you. Thank you. Not too savvy. Yeah. And thank you so much Yeah. For coming on the show. Great. Yeah. Great to see you guys. The show. Have a great rest of your day. Take it easy. To you soon. Take care, guys. Let me tell you about public.com.