Pindrop builds deepfake-combatting and multi-factor authentication products aimed at businesses in banking, finance and related industries. The company says its tools can identify contact-center callers with higher accuracy than rival solutions and offers fraud prevention, authentication and liveness capabilities. Pindrop trains models on a dataset of over 20 million utterances—both synthetic and genuine—and has trained more than 330 TTS models to help detect synthetic speech, emphasizing acoustic and spectro-temporal features to mitigate bias. The team publicly acknowledges bias risks in audio models and aims to address representation and dialect issues in its training data. Founded in 2011 by Vijay Balasubramaniyan, Paul Judge and Mustaque Ahamad, the Atlanta-based firm employs around 250 people and has previously raised $234.77 million in venture capital from investors including Vitruvian Partners, CapitalG, IVP and Andreessen Horowitz. Pindrop plans to use recent financing to accelerate product development, hiring and expansion into sectors such as healthcare, retail, media and travel and into countries facing significant deepfake threats. Pindrop offers a platform that creates a voice "fingerprint" by analysing nearly 1,400 acoustic attributes to identify tone, speaking patterns, device and environment to verify callers and voice commands. The company’s product is used primarily to prevent voice fraud in customer-service interactions but is being expanded into any voice-interface use cases, including connected cars, home security, smart offices and smart speakers. The growth strategy for the funding round targets international expansion (starting in Europe and then Asia) and extension into IoT device integrations. Pindrop reports customers that include eight of the 10 largest U.S. banks and five of the largest U.S. insurers, protecting more than 200 million consumer accounts. Management says the customer-service business was on the path to profitability by Q1 2019 and that Pindrop had stopped over $350 million in voice-based fraud and attacks so far in 2018. The company was founded in 2011 in Atlanta, GA, and has raised $212 million to date. Pindrop provides voice-security and authentication solutions for enterprise call centers using its patented Phoneprinting technology to identify, locate and authenticate phone devices from call audio. Its Phoneprinting system detects roughly 80% of fraudulent calls and protects hundreds of millions of calls annually. Pindrop counts broad adoption among enterprises, including eight of the top 10 U.S. banks and two of the top five insurance carriers, and has expanded into retail, healthcare, e-commerce and government verticals. In 2016 the company doubled its customer base, grew revenues by more than 100% year-over-year, achieved a 500% increase in calls protected year-over-year, and ended the year with 255 employees. Pindrop opened a London office and won its first European customer, Lloyds Banking Group. The company says it will scale and expand in the voice security and authentication market with new board additions and investor support. Founded in 2011, Pindrop is venture-backed by Andreessen Horowitz, CapitalG, Citi Ventures, Felicis Ventures, GV and IVP. Pindrop helps businesses avoid phone scams by analyzing call audio and caller metadata to generate a risk profile for each call. The system examines call origin, line type (landline, cell or VoIP) and audio artifacts such as frequency filters, codec artifacts, packet loss and dropped frames to detect fraud. When the system flags a call as potentially fraudulent, agents can ask additional security questions. Its technology is in use at insurance companies, government agencies, retailers and three of the four largest U.S. banks, and the company has screened more than 360 million calls. Pindrop raised a $75M Series C led by Google Capital and had previously raised $47M since launching in 2012. The company plans to use the funding to expand internationally—building on a ten-person UK office and planned moves into EMEA, Latin America and Asia Pacific—and to increase investments in research and new product development. Pindrop Security provides enterprise solutions to secure phone and voice communications, focusing on phone fraud prevention and call center authentication. Its Phoneprinting technology can identify, locate and authenticate phone devices from call audio, detecting fraudulent calls and verifying legitimate callers. The company sells solutions intended to reduce fraud losses and authentication expense for banks, brokerages and retailers. Pindrop is led by executive chairman Paul Judge, Ph.D., and CEO Vijay Balasubramaniyan, Ph.D. The company is based in Atlanta, GA. In February 2015 it closed a Series B financing to support its commercial efforts.

Total raised

$312M

Funding rounds

7

Latest round

Debt Financing

Latest activity

Jul 2024