
The arts-minded daughter of two engineers built her career finding human stories in numbers. At Pindrop, that instinct has led her to a harder question: what happens when a familiar voice is no longer proof of a familiar person?

The former White House lawyer has spent three decades where technology outruns the rulebook. At Pindrop, she is helping decide what trust should mean when a familiar voice may be synthetic.

A declined credit card sent a Georgia Tech researcher hunting for truth in the noise. Fifteen years later, his old question - who is really speaking? - has become the defining riddle of synthetic media.
Milind Borkar is the founder and CEO of Illuma, a Plano, Texas company that uses passive voice biometrics and synthetic-voice detection to authenticate callers and stop phone-channel fraud at credit unions and community banks. He holds a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech, is named on 21 patents, and spent a decade at Texas Instruments launching more than 50 products before founding Illuma in 2016.
Piyush Verma is the co-founder and CEO of Neural Defend, an AI cybersecurity startup that detects deepfakes across video, audio, images, and real-time streams. A two-time founder and former MIT, Harvard, and Tsinghua researcher, he previously built Manush Labs, an impact accelerator backed by billionaire Desh Deshpande, and founded the MIT India Initiative. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and MIT Tata Fellow trained in design at IIT Delhi, Verma now works to defend real human identities against synthetic deception, with Neural Defend raising $600K in pre-seed funding and partnering with Zee News on India's first media-led deepfake verification system.
Luke Arrigoni is the founder and CEO of Loti, a Seattle startup that hunts the internet for deepfakes, impersonators, and unauthorized images of its users and gets them taken down - usually within 17 hours. A mathematics graduate turned data scientist, he spent over a decade running the AI consultancy Arricor for clients like Getty Images and AT&T before co-founding Loti in 2022 with his wife Rebekah Arrigoni. The company scans roughly 100 million images and videos a day, has captured a large share of the A-list celebrity market, raised a $16.2M Series A led by Khosla Ventures, and now offers free likeness protection to everyday people.
Ricardo Amper is the Founder and CEO of Incode Technologies, a San Francisco-based AI-powered identity verification unicorn valued at $1.25 billion. A Mexican-born serial entrepreneur with two prior exits totaling ~$200 million, Amper built Incode from a near-failed social media startup into a global leader in biometric authentication and KYC/AML compliance — processing over 4 billion identity checks for clients including Citi, Nubank, Ford Credit, and government agencies. He is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer contributor, a champion of Gen Z hiring, and the driving force behind Incode's DeepSight deepfake-detection platform.
Jake Seid is Co-Founder and General Partner at Ballistic Ventures, a cybersecurity-only venture capital firm managing over $700M in assets. A MIT-trained engineer with the school's highest student honor, he helped commercialize broadband at Cisco, launched Lightspeed Venture Partners as a founding team member, ran the 800-person team at Auction.com through its $1.6B acquisition, then backed 12 unicorns solo at Stone Bridge Ventures before co-founding Ballistic to go all-in on securing the digital world.
Grace Chang is the Taiwanese-American founder and CEO of Kintsugi, the Berkeley-based startup that built AI capable of detecting clinical depression and anxiety from just 20 seconds of free-form speech. A five-time entrepreneur with roots in signal processing and consumer tech, she raised $28 million, launched Japan's default mental health screener, and built the world's largest annotated voice dataset for mental health machine learning - before making all of Kintsugi's research and technology open source in early 2026 after FDA regulatory hurdles made the venture-backed model unsustainable.
Michael Matias is the co-founder and CEO of Clarity, a New York-based AI cybersecurity company building world-leading deepfake detection technology. A Stanford computer science graduate, Unit 8200 IDF veteran, and former partner at Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, Matias has invested in 80+ deep-tech startups through Matias Ventures, hosted over 1,000 episodes of the 20MinuteLeaders podcast, authored the book 'Age Is Only an Int,' and written for leading Israeli financial newspapers. Clarity raised a $16M seed round in 2024 led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Walden Catalyst Ventures.
Doug Aley is the CEO of Paravision, a San Francisco-based AI company building the world's most accurate facial recognition and identity AI technology. A Stanford and Harvard Business School alumnus, Aley co-founded his first company at 19, scaled Zulily from $100M to $700M in sales pre-IPO, and eventually landed at Paravision where he has guided the company to back-to-back #1 global rankings on NIST's Face Recognition Vendor Tests. Under his leadership, Paravision has raised $47M in funding, established itself as the only US company in the top 10 globally for facial recognition accuracy, and built a portfolio of AI tools spanning liveness detection, deepfake detection, and biometric authentication used in government, travel, border security, and enterprise applications worldwide.