302: Vijay Balasubramaniyan, Co-Founder of Pindrop, on The Journey to Raising over $200 Million to Detect Audio Deepfakes

AI and the Future of Work

Vijay is the co-founder and CEO of Pindrop, a leader in voice security technology. With a background in engineering and research roles at Google, Siemens, IBM Research, and Intel, Vijay invented phone printing technology in 2010 and launched Pindrop in 2011. Under his leadership, Pindrop has raised over $200 million from investors, including JC2 Ventures, led by by Cisco's John Chambers. Holding multiple patents in VoIP security and scalability, Vijay frequently speaks at major conferences such as RSA, Black Hat, and CCS. He earned his PhD in computer science from Georgia Tech.

In this conversation, we discuss:

1. The evolution of voice technology from landline telephony to modern voice systems.
2. The challenges of educating people about voice security and deepfake threats in the early 2010s.
3. How the rise of Alexa and other voice assistants transformed public perception of voice technology.
4. The rapid development of voice cloning tools and their implications for security.
5. The role of deepfakes in political interference, including high-profile cases President Biden.
6. How companies like Pindrop are using AI to detect and combat voice-related deepfake attacks in real-time.

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