Revel.ai is a digital artist agency and industry leader in hyperrealistic, synthetic content creation using artificial intelligence or AI. They work with some of the world’s biggest brands in the entertainment industry to create award-winning visuals for films, series, and commercials. For instance, they were behind the viral Morgan Freeman deepfake. Upon entering the studio, it was clear that the setup process was extensive, as there was a considerable amount of equipment arranged for the shoot in the studio. An array of massive lights towered over the Revel.ai crew. The beaming lights encircled a 19-camera rig that required several hours to meticulously set up. The cameras were equidistant from one another and carefully mounted with lenses focused toward the seat in which the subject would be seated. Their distance was measured using bright tape that started at a single point, the subject’s seat, and spread out to form a half circle. It was set up in this way to ensure that all angles of the face would be recorded.

Nina Schick was to be the subject of the trailblazing deepfake. Nina Schick is an author, entrepreneur, advisor, and public speaker specializing in Generative AI. She is dedicated to making AI accessible and is one of the first experts in the field. She is the Founder of Tamang Ventures, an advisory and creative firm focused on Gen AI, and the author of the seminal best-seller, Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse, making her the ideal fit for this revolutionary deepfake video. I was struck by Nina’s passion and excitement for AI. In our discussion, while filming, Nina emphasized that AI is one of the most powerful technologies of our time. She described it as a tipping point that will impact humanity beyond comprehension.

Bob de Jong, Co-Founder and Creative Director of Revel.ai recorded Nina’s facial movements to capture various emotions. She expressed a wide range of emotions, from happiness to sadness to anger. She was prompted to exaggerate her face by laughing loudly and dramatically furrowing her brow to capture her feelings authentically. Nina’s expressive face allowed her to make facial micro-movements. She conveyed the full range of facial mannerisms with relative ease. It was also necessary to capture her face from all angles. She was instructed to shift her head from side to side and up and down. To capture a full range of facial expressions, Nina was also asked to speak, making sounds that allowed her mouth to contort. This enabled Revel.ai to accurately record various movements, such as smiles, frowns, and other subtle gestures in order to create an accurate representation of her facial poses. This footage would give a complete picture of Nina’s emotions allowing the AI models to recognize each emotion with accuracy and ease.

The initial shoot was complete but only the beginning of the process for Revel.ai — in the coming weeks, they would capture footage of the model in the video, record Nina’s voiceover, and train AI algorithms. After Revel.ai trained an incredibly life-like AI model of Nina until the output was indistinguishable from the real Nina, Truepic cryptographically signed and timestamped the video. The output was signed as an AI generation with Truepic’s transparency tools, including the named creators. The video was then published with transparent details. The breakthrough video was marked with a tamper-evident seal using Truepic’s transparency tools, which are compliant with the open content provenance standard developed by the C2PA. Truepic’s signing solution allows digital content to transparently display where it came from, eliminating any confusion resulting from AI-generated content, showcasing a future where all content on the internet can be transparent.

Watch the Video: Mirror of Reflection

How We Made the World’s First Transparent Deepfake was originally published in Truepic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In today’s economy, warranties are critical as the value and care of used cars are paramount for most families. However, the accompanying costs and delays associated with each warranty inspection are challenging for both the customer and the warranty provider. Auto warranty providers have traditionally relied on third parties and antiquated processes to assess claims. These options are expensive and slow, typically taking up to three days and several hundred dollars. Truepic’s image authentication technology is transforming the auto warranty industry, alleviating these pain points associated with the claims process. In a matter of seconds, Truepic’s virtual inspection platform allows service providers to self-inspect and submit verified images to warranty providers for claims and approval. The technology authenticates the image’s date, time, location, and all associated data ensuring trust and transparency. With image authentication technology, our partners have reduced inspection times to minutes while dramatically reducing costs.

Truepic Vision provides simple, fast, and accurate verification for auto inspections. Vision helps reduce premium leakage by authenticating images with supreme accuracy, improving auto insurance risk assessment. Captured images are served back to insurers in real-time with authenticity checks, resulting in significant time and cost savings. Image verification technology saves time and reduces costs by 75% on average. In addition, authenticated images minimize reliance on third-party inspection agencies, reduce repair cycle time, and increase service bay capacity with less vehicle downtime.

Digitizing processes by adopting image authentication technology allows for accurate mileage and vehicle identification to be collected instantly from policyholders. Truepic Vision enables insurers to verify vehicle possession, location, and mileage accurately. Contactless odometer and VIN extraction enable precise vehicle information to be collected in a matter of seconds, establishing a frictionless customer experience. Moreover, the platform ensures that drivers report accurate mileage to assess the right risk premium. Verifying the possession of the right car, including key features such as year, make, model, wheel details, and performance, becomes a streamlined process. Another benefit is the ability to confirm the location of the car and whether or not it is in the expected location. Getting an accurate odometer reading makes it easy to determine whether or not it falls within the expected range. Estimating how much a car is worth becomes more accurate. By using Truepic, you can ensure the vehicle is real, is in the right location, and matches your expectations, all at once.

Vision can be used in insurance underwriting, used car lending, and auto warranty. There is a higher risk of paying claims when drivers underreport mileage, thus receiving a lower insurance premium. Underwriting becomes more efficient and can be done confidently using Truepic’s automated vehicle and mileage verification. Without image authenticity, more time is spent deciding whether or not to approve a repair order request. Frictionless and trustworthy claims processing is made possible with Truepic’s virtual vehicle verification, optimizing auto warranty processes. Acquiring inaccurate or underreported odometer estimates makes it difficult to assess how much to loan to the borrower. Underwriting loans with Truepic’s virtual vehicle verification brings confidence to used car lending.

Truepic Vision’s image inspection platform allows service providers to receive verified images and videos instantly. Images and videos are served back in real-time with over twenty authenticity checks, saving significant time and reducing cost. In short, this technology is disrupting the auto warranty space.

Accelerating Auto Inspections and Lowering Costs with Image Authentication Technology was originally published in Truepic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The economic landscape facing businesses today is highly variable and uncertain. The U.S. private sector is turbulent, currently at its weakest in 18 months. Supply chain shocks, the continued Russian invasion of Ukraine, and increased tightening across central banks have created challenging global economic conditions. According to Reuters, there is a 45% chance of the U.S. facing a downturn within the next 12 months. Businesses were already forced to pivot during COVID to adapt to increased digitization and increasingly asynchronous operations. Now, instead of returning to life and business, as usual, they find themselves in a new way of doing business: a digital landscape lacking trust.

During the pandemic, Truepic’s flagship product, Vision, helped struggling organizations digitize the operations and processes impacted by shutdowns and distancing. In short, we kept countless enterprises moving and even expanding. Vision is a digital documentation platform that provides an instant and seamless way to receive authenticated, trustworthy images and videos directly from customers worldwide. In addition, Vision’s cost-effective pricing, frictionless accessibility, and short turnaround time dramatically increase a company’s bottom line by sharply reducing the cost and time spent on inspections and documentation. For companies looking to verify identities of their loan applicants, conduct home inspections or even verify the condition of assets in inaccessible areas, it gave them a way to send, receive and evaluate items efficiently. So efficient, in fact, Truepic Vision saved businesses an average of 70–75% percent based on human-centric inspection-based industries.

As we look at the new economic landscape in front of us, we see businesses again at a crossroads. Many are stuck between a digital future and the analog operations their business were built on. The reality, however, for most businesses, is there is no turning back- analog operations are costly and slow and will be hard to scale in the digital landscape. Truepic Vision is the conduit of digital transformation. For example, now one of the country’s largest auto warranty providers can perform an auto inspection in under 5 minutes without an adjuster present and with complete trust in the digital content. As a result, businesses can avoid the hassles of in-person inspections, deliver services to their customers faster than ever before, and spend more time focusing on other issues. This process of trusted digitization is made possible because our industry-leading technology combats photo manipulation through comprehensive fraud prevention and detection tests. Media captured with the Vision platform provides verified metadata that is established as unedited and confirmed as original. Your client can snap a photo or video, and you can trust the result, much like if you sent an inspector. We believe this will be a critical tool to help businesses thrive in this digital economy.

Credibly leveraged Truepic’s remote inspection platform to digitize its due diligence process on loans throughout the country. Truepic Vision allows Credibly to deliver a secure camera into the hands of its customers, replacing the need for human-centric oversight. Credibly deployed Truepic Vision as part of its due diligence process and has used the platform on hundreds of loans across the US and Mexico. Truepic’s technology helped Credibly virtually vet and deploy millions of dollars in loans while rooting out fraud and increasing trust throughout the pandemic and beyond.

As industries embrace digitalization, they will need to couple the process with trust, fraud prevention, and efficiency. Image authenticity is not just “nice to have” but a critical necessity for digitized operations today and into the future. Scaling operations while increasing speed and expanding opportunity while maintaining diligence is a combination that only trust and authenticity in digital content can deliver.

In summary, Truepic Vision has helped our partners and clients navigate the great digital transformation while delivering critical time, cost, and speed benefits that have fueled growth and expansion.

Why Your Business Needs Image Authenticity to Succeed in Today’s Economic Climate was originally published in Truepic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One year ago I had the opportunity to respond to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s (FHFA) Request for Information (RFI) on how to modernize the appraisal process. I urged that the FHFA consider how new technology, particularly authenticated imagery, can help power desktop appraisals and remote inspections. On October 18, 2021 I was encouraged to see that the FHFA will permanently allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to accept desktop appraisals for new purchase loans starting in early 2022. I believe this is a significant step forward that is the culmination of a variety of innovative initiatives taken by the industry in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This shift in process is bound to have down-stream implications for insurers and other financial services organizations because it dynamically changes consumer preferences. We too, at Truepic, saw the digitization of inspections taking place at a rapid pace even before the global pandemic hit in early 2020 across all financial services sectors.

The acceptance and demand of these virtual inspections are tremendously valuable, and the FHFA’s recent move to embrace and encourage this innovative technology will help not only drive change within their industry, but sub industries and related markets too. However, it is important to point out that one key component is necessary to successfully implement desktop appraisals and no-touch inspections — fraud prevention. According to Corelogic’s 2021 Mortgage Fraud Report, there has been a 37.2% increase in fraud risk. The report, widely considered the industry standard for nationwide fraud monitoring and analysis, helps highlight the growing problem of mortgage fraud. Similarly, the FBI estimates non-healthcare insurance fraud accounts for more than $40 billion annually highlighting how other financial service industries are facing similar challenges. As the mortgage, lending, and insurance industries move to digitize their appraisals and inspection processes, it is important that strong fraud prevention mechanisms are built into the digitized process. Today, apps, websites, and even synthetic media are readily and easily available to defraud lenders, mortgage companies, banks, property insurers, and government agencies into deceptive properties, loans or claims.

Truepic has built fraud prevention tests to help insurers or lenders at the front-end of underwriting and prior to loan execution to stop fraud from happening. Any image or video captured by an interested party is tested for authenticity and its associated data such as time, date, location, and orientation are all verified and instantly sent back to the appraisers for informed judgements on loans, mortgages, and appraisals. Our partners understand this helps prevent fraud from ever happening because bad actors will either stop communicating or submit fraudulent information and be flagged by Truepic’s technology.

Truepic’s solution was not built exclusively for mortgage inspections, but over the past few years we have learned just how useful it is for the home financing and insurance industries. Its utility is beneficial far beyond just fraud prevention. In fact, digitized trusted inspections represent significant operational efficiencies that can transform industry.

In 2021 alone, Truepic’s Vision platform was used to perform over 18,000 audits for mortgages, loan inspections, and appraisals, totaling in over 400,000 authenticated images and videos delivered to appraisers to make informed judgements in a matter of seconds. These inspections took place in 44 states, Puerto Rico, Canada, Costa Rica, and Brazil. In addition to extending trust for remote appraisals there are notable time, cost, and Co2 reductions for our many clients and partners adopting our authenticating technology for desktop appraisals. Conservatively, we estimate that our partners reduced costs by more than 70%, and wait times by more than 35,000 days annually. “Following the [Texas] disaster declaration [2021], we were able to get our loans moving within hours with Truepic Vision. Normally we would have to wait 2–4 weeks for inspections to take place following a disaster declaration,” Jay Parrott, Royal United Mortgage. Further, by replacing human centric and thereby offsetting their associated transportation emissions, our partners prevented the emissions of over 510,000 pounds of Co2 — the equivalent of over 10,000 trees’ absorption of carbon dioxide.

We know that remote appraisals will help FHFA and mortgage lenders increase the velocity and reduce the wait times of home loans, while also reducing costs. We are also proud that our image authentication technology can extend trust to both parties and root out fraud, which will become the basis of scaling desktop appraisals across not just this industry, but all related ones too. We expect 2022 to be the first year in which desktop appraisals become a true staple in the mortgage industry and we are excited to play a part.

FHFA’s Move to Desktop Appraisals is Significant, But Don’t Forget About Fraud Prevention was originally published in Truepic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Five years ago, we embarked on our journey with a fundamental belief about what the future should look like. People should be able to trust what they see and hear on the internet.

Today, we’re taking an enormous step forward on this journey. Truepic has launched our iOS and Android Software Development Kit (SDK), called Truepic Lens. This new product allows any mobile application to integrate our award winning secure camera technology, directly in their own app.

The result? Any mobile app can now capture and display the industry’s most trusted digital photo. Even better — every photo captured through Lens conforms to the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity’s (C2PA) open internet specification, launching at a special event today, January 26th. During the event, a preview of the entire system, from capture to display, will be shown in action.

One big question remains — how quickly can we drive adoption of this new product across the mobile app ecosystem? We’ve never been better equipped to make this happen. In 2021, Truepic grew its team by more than 70%, customer base and revenues by over 150%, verified images by over 500%, and closed a $26M Series B financing led by strategic investors, including Microsoft, Adobe, Sony, Hearst, and others.

Why does this matter?

At this very moment — millions of people are actively altering your perception of the world, and what’s transpiring around you. Why?

Most manipulate media without maligned intention but rather for entertainment purposes. However, even seemingly benign alterations can lead to negative consequences — especially when impressionable youth regularly consume “perfect images” on social media, causing them to lose touch of reality or contribute to lower self-esteem.

Some are bad actors submitting falsified insurance claims, driving your rates up. Others are creating false profiles and scamming your friends and family on internet dating platforms. Some are creating fake ride share accounts, leading to assaults (over 4k+ instances in the past three years on a single platform). Others are creating fake listings on peer-to-peer commerce sites, which at best, leads to simple fraud, and at worst, leads to even more assault/deaths. Some are participating in the spread of falsified information about COVID, treatments, and vaccines for social and/or political gain.

If this all were not bad enough — synthetic media (deepfake) technology has improved in speed, ease of creation, and quality in 2021. As one example, the technology has been democratized so far that anyone visiting thispersondoesnotexist.com can generate synthetic head shots with the refresh of a web browser. Experts such as Nina Schick are expecting billions of synthetic images and videos to be created in 2022. As more synthetic media is generated at little-to-no cost by computers, the more our reality will be distorted as nothing can be easily trusted as original and genuine.

This is deeply troubling to us, and we’d imagine it is to you too.

Can Truepic solve all of this distortion in its entirety? Absolutely not. Problems of this magnitude require a whole-of-society approach to resolve. But, Truepic’s bet is that by empowering people to spread high-integrity visual content, we can dramatically counterbalance the spread of false content. By knowing with high confidence what is real, we can better determine what might be fake.

How does the SDK work?

Expect some of your favorite companies to begin integrating Truepic Lens into their mobile applications over the coming year. This includes insurers, banks, marketplaces, dating sites, rental sites, media publications, and more. These services can begin capturing original content through Truepic immediately, helping to eliminate visual deception, which is a key vector in committing fraud.

Over time, on services that display digital images back to you, these photos and videos will be shown with an informational indicator. This indicator allows you, the viewer, to dive a layer deeper into the digital content you are viewing, and see the original, unaltered photo and metadata. And, if the image has been altered through a compatible tool, you can easily see each edit/revision to that image, no tech background required!

And great news — Adobe’s Creative Suite and Truepic are already completely interoperable thanks to the C2PA standard, ensuring the world’s most popular image editing software can retain trust markers generated at photo capture — all the way through publishing to you, the viewer.

Architecture

To date, Truepic has used various blockchain technologies to record and preserve the provenance of each media file. Specifically, we have written data to a blockchain, and connected authentication at capture to that chain in a way that shows data integrity and immutability. Thus far, this approach has been successful for our partners. However, as the content provenance industry continues to develop, it’s become clear that blockchain technology won’t power the future of image verification across the internet. Public key Infrastructure (PKI) will.

PKI certificates aren’t new. They’ve long been used for signing PDFs, securing websites through SSL/TLS, and ensuring the integrity of applications in an App Store, all to relay authenticity. In short, it is a tamper-evident “tattoo” or cryptographic watermark digitally stored into the file that, if altered, is immediately detectable as inauthentic. Leaders in the provenance space have come to this conclusion because the PKI system is far more flexible and sustainable when considering the more than one trillion crowdsourced images captured annually. Benefits include:

• Climate — Using PKIs has minimal impact on the environment.
• Connectivity — Relying on PKIs does not require internet connectivity.
• Ease of use — Consumers are more familiar with interacting with certificates (i.e. SSL on websites), vs. blockchain, which still has substantial UI/UX challenges for conveying trust.
• Privacy — PKI eliminates the requirement to share images with the authentication service (Truepic in this case).

Truepic Lens is architected using a PKI system from day one — ensuring maximum security, privacy, reliability, and ease of use.

How can you help?

Want to get your hands dirty? If you are interested in joining our fast growing team — and joining the fight against fraud and disinformation, please visit our careers page. Truepic was just voted one of Built In’s Best Remote Companies to Work For!

If you work actively in this industry, and would like to make contributions, please consider applying to be a member of the C2PA.

And, if you would like to be included in future content authenticity related events, consider joining the Content Authenticity Member Community.

Finally — if you want to stay up to date on Truepic, we just launched a newsletter called “Trusted Future” — which aggregates all of the industry news in one monthly email!

On January 26th, the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) held an important milestone event, releasing Version 1.0 of their open internet specification. During the event, a preview of the technology and open standard was highlighted, with Truepic’s new Lens product as the capture component.

Truepic’s New SDK Will Power Trusted Photo Capture Across the Internet was originally published in Truepic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jason Slack, Director, Product Engineering & Liron Golan, Director, Information Security

On Friday, December 10, 2021 a new security vulnerability (CVE-2021–44228) was published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for the Apache Log4j software utility, a commonly used open source logging framework used to record the activity of applications. This vulnerability, if exploited, could allow attackers the ability to import malware that could compromise machines.

Truepic assembled a cross-functional team to assess any potential exposure to this vulnerability and plan for any necessary remediation steps to protect Truepic systems. Our assessment determined that Truepic has no exposure to Log4j vulnerability CVE-2021–44228 within our own software that would impact the safe use of Truepic products as we do not directly leverage Log4J.

Truepic is actively communicating with all vendors and monitoring for any disclosed impacts within the software systems. Should there be any updates, we will immediately deploy any patches or recommended remediations once they have been released or communicated.

As this situation continues to evolve, we will notify our clients immediately if any concerns arise, as the extent to which Log4j is integrated into the world’s software systems is still being researched and discovered in real-time, making response a dynamic activity for all security programs.

Truepic’s Software: No Exposure to Log4j Vulnerability, Monitoring Situation Closely was originally published in Truepic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This has been a significant month for Truepic. We began September by announcing our fundraise led by M12, Microsoft’s venture arm, and today we are honored to be selected as one of the five winners of the 2021 Index Project Award. Founded in 2002, The Index Project foundation pushes the boundaries of design-for-good by focusing on design that solves real needs in our society — what we call ‘design to improve life.’ This award is quite meaningful to us, and we would like to briefly explain why.

From Online Dating to Human Rights Documentation

In 2017, it was estimated that the world captured well over 1.2 trillion digital images annually, we can only assume that figure has grown significantly. Further, over the past 18 months, we have also seen the world increase its reliance on digital communication and information throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In short, digital imagery is only becoming more intertwined with our work, lives, and decision-making. Simultaneously, advances in artificial Intelligence and editing tools have made it possible to easily manipulate or wholly synthesize media for malicious or deception purposes. This juxtaposition of reliance and manipulation of digital media have real effects on our world and society.

In business, COVID-19 accelerated a pre-existing trend: the digitization of financial and enterprise transactions, most of which involve image capture/display as a critical component. Digitizing transactions brings benefits of speed, ease, and convenience for businesses and their customers. However, one notable concern is trust — how can businesses and their customers trust that financial decisions are being made off of high-integrity and trustworthy imagery? The proliferation and ease of image falsification technology gives fraudsters the necessary tools to deceive underprepared businesses. Such fraud will often raise costs for all consumers. For example, fraudsters submit falsified insurance claims with manipulated imagery, which raises rates for all insured with a specific company/industry. The FBI estimates that the annual cost of non-health insurance fraud to be over $40 billion. Some of the worst types of insurance fraud occur during acute crises like natural disasters in which the government and insurers are working to provide support quickly and rapidly to victims in compressed time frames. We have proven, with many of our partners, that introducing a trust layer into a digitized process accelerates support with trust and efficiency, while protecting the business and consumers from fraud. In the case of natural disasters, authenticated provenance-based imagery provides much-needed trust that helps support to victims far faster than ever before. This is just a snapshot on how authenticated media will meet the needs of a changing world and consumer base in business.

In society, we are seeing similar patterns with arguably worse consequences. Much like private industry, we are digitizing our lives in rapid succession and making important personal and trust decisions based on what we see and hear online. On a daily basis, people are forming opinions, making voting decisions or making deep personal connections based on what they see online. The same issues plaguing businesses are also felt by everyday people — how do you know you are making decisions based off of high integrity and trustworthy media? The FTC reported that the median loss to online dating scams was approximately $2,600 per victim — totaling in hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Much of this fraud starts from one manipulated or falsified image on a web platform and spirals from there.

Visual identity fraud extends beyond romance and into media, elections, and voting too. Truepic’s technology is helping address this problem by supporting organizations helping to inform the general public. One of Truepic’s grantees is Ballotpedia, the United States’ top political encyclopedia, which runs a popular survey to help verify and educate the voting public on political candidates throughout the country. In early 2020, a motivated student managed to generate a false identity, submit a Ballotpedia survey, and, as a result, get the verified blue check mark from Twitter. This episode highlighted how unsophisticated actors could easily create fake identities and spread disinformation. Soon after, Ballotpedia was awarded a Truepic grant for pro-bono usage of its Vision platform to help verify images submitted through its survey. To date, Truepic has helped Ballotpedia verify over 1,000 political candidates in 49 states around the country. Another example of how image authenticity can be used to empower organizations to help provide accurate information to decision-makers.

Empowering Any Application

Our success thus far has been affirming and we aim to scale our technology to help more and more people. Truepic is developing its next product — Lens — which will allow any business, organization, or platform, to embed our image authentication technology directly into its application. This will deliver the option of secure media capture directly to consumers who are capturing images for business or personal use through any mobile application. Whether it is an online dating profile, insurance claim, or citizen journalism effort — this gives the user the option to attach provenance information to an image and relay trust to whom they are sending the image. This innovation coincides with the development of the world’s first open standard on digital content provenance by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). We believe that soon millions of people around the world will have the ability to capture secure media and have it ingested and displayed on many of the websites, businesses, and platforms they engage with daily.

Oftentimes trust in visual imagery is only considered within specific parameters like disinformation, consumer fraud, or media. However, at Truepic, we see the whole spectrum and it is clear — integrity and trust in what we see and hear online touches nearly every aspect of our lives in both business and society. We believe that our technology and mission will help solve this real issue in our society. This recognition by the Index Project is incredibly affirming for our entire team and helps drive our passion to continue our work to improve people’s daily lives. We are honored and grateful for the recognition.

The Index Project Award Recognizes Need for Online Visual Trust was originally published in Truepic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For those that already know our company — our newest partners will come as little surprise. We’ve worked closely with many of these groups on industry leading efforts such as the Content Authenticity Initiative and Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. Each partner shares a fundamental belief that the authenticity and provenance of visual media is best determined at the time of capture— and they are backing Truepic as the leader in this emerging sector. Our team couldn’t be more excited to have such a strategic and influential group of companies supporting us as we enter our next phase of growth.

Our plan is very simple — continue supporting our valued customers & partners with the most innovative image authenticity solutions on the market. This starts with the upcoming launch of the much anticipated Truepic SDK.

Why?

Visual media is at the center of nearly every enterprise, financial, and personal interaction we have each day. As a society, we have a constant stream of visual communication coming at us from every angle. We may be consuming the news, our social media feeds, renting a home for our family vacation, meeting a new partner online, making a purchase on a marketplace, amongst so much more. Visual communication is at the center of each of these interactions, and fundamentally, they all lack trust.

Unfortunately, seeing is no longer believing, as trust in digital photos and videos is fundamentally broken. While our insurance company would love to allow us to send in a quick photo of a fender bender for reimbursement-they’re also dealing with $40B+ in annual fraud due to bad actors and organized fraud rings. This trust gap across the internet has resulted in significant inefficiencies, financial loss, and brand degradation in the companies we’ve come to love & rely on, and that negatively impacts all of us.

As the importance and speed of information transfer continues to grow — we are now subject to even more pressing issues, including disinformation in political elections, mis- and dis-information around vaccines, and so much more. While the commercial implications of this shift are dramatic — the societal implications are potentially devastating.

Visual media is at the center of every interaction we have online. Truepic exists to help people see the truth.

Approach

Truepic is built on the principle that verifying the integrity of imaging data at the time it originates is the most accurate & scalable approach to correcting this trend. We call our patented core technology ‘Controlled Capture’ — and leverage the latest approaches in secure sensor acquisition, machine learning, & cryptography to ensure photos & videos captured by our mobile camera software have known origin & authenticity.

Truepic’s first product offering, launched in 2018, is called Truepic Vision. Vision is a SaaS platform that enables our partners to instantly gather & review images & videos that have known origin & authenticity. Since launch, we’ve grown to service 100+ valued customers & partners including Accion Opportunity Fund, Equifax, EXL Service Inc, Ford Motor Company, Palomar Holdings Inc., Transunion, United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) and so many more.

To-date — Truepic has verified over 5 Million photos for our partners. Here’s the first slide from our Series B deck showing what that growth looks like from launch through EoQ1 21.

Those 5 Million images have helped each of our partners make better down-stream decisions for their customers. Whether it be an insurance claim, a loan decision, or an international organization verifying programs in a conflict zone — Truepic Vision is helping improve decision making across the board.

What’s next…

We are continuing to grow Vision, our turn-key SaaS platform for collecting verified documentation. This product has proven to be critical in a world where remote access to documentation is a must-have. If you have a critical need for verifying a person, business, or asset, Truepic Vision can help.

Next, we are launching the much-anticipated SDK product, called Truepic Lens. Lens will integrate directly into any native iOS or Android application, allowing for seamless capture of high-trust images & videos directly in-app. This product is flexible by design, and aims to power the core camera across the entire app ecosystem to improve trust across our favorite services.

We are also continuing to invest heavily in both the Content Authenticity Initiative and Coalition for Content Provenance & Authenticity. Our belief is that a standardized way to store, transmit, and display digital media with known provenance will only help expedite the distribution & value of high integrity imagery. Which, helps expedite our own mission of restoring trust in visual media across the internet.

This financing represents the largest investment to-date in provenance based media, and one of the top investments in the broader ‘truth technology’ sector. We’re extremely excited to deploy these new funds to improve the future of visual media for our customers, partners, consumers, and society. We’re also grateful to have the support of such a well-respected group of investors, with Microsoft’s venture arm — M12, Adobe, Sony Innovation, Hearst, and individuals from Stone Point Capital all joining our cap table.

We’re just at the start of our journey — and our team is more well-equipped than ever to alter the course of trust online. If you’re interested in joining us for the ride — we’re hiring! Please keep an eye on our Careers page for new postings. Learn more about our company here.

Announcing our $26M Series B Fundraise was originally published in Truepic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Read the full story on the Truepic Blog

Provenance Based Inspections Will Dramatically Reduce Carbon Footprints was originally published in Truepic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This month the FBI issued an official notification warning private industry of the ‘almost certain’ use of synthetic content for fraud purposes. The notice went on to explain that such threats will likely become evident as an extension of spearfishing campaigns or social engineering attacks. The same notice explained a new and emerging threat known as “Business Identity Compromise” (BIC), which leverages Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to develop synthetic corporate personas or emulate an existing employee. In these scenarios, according to the notice, the likely goal will be to deliver “financial and reputational” harm to victim businesses and organizations.

Read the full story. Head to the Truepic Blog

Deepfakes and Synthetic Media Are Also Threats to Private Industry, Provenance Technology Can Help was originally published in Truepic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.