Reality Defender: Enabling Trust in an AI-Powered World

When Reality Defender was founded, the company had a clear mission: enable trust in an AI-powered world. For years, the team has been heads-down building what became the industry's most sophisticated deepfake detection platform. Fortune 500 companies rely on us. Government agencies trust us with national security. We pioneered multimodal and multimodel deepfake detection that catches files others miss.

Yet somewhere along the way, our team realized something crucial: we were helping others win battles against weaponized AI, but not the overall war.

The Math That Changed Everything

Since 2021, our team of 50 defenders have built incredible technology. We integrated within major enterprises, secured critical infrastructure in governments around the world, and prevented millions in fraud. By any traditional metric, we were succeeding.

Yet the math didn't add up. Deepfakes were proliferating exponentially. Every day, new tools made creation easier, cheaper, more convincing. Meanwhile, our enterprise-focused approach meant we could protect hundreds of organizations — but what about everyone else?

We could make strategic hires and continue to cement partnerships, build custom integrations forever, and still only scratch the surface.

Or we could fundamentally rethink our approach.

From day one, we believed that single-model or single-media detection is like locking your front door while leaving windows open. Bad actors don't limit themselves to one type of deepfake. They use whatever works.

That's why we built our platform to detect across audio, images, and video. It's why we blend multiple detection models for resilience. This approach served our enterprise clients well, catching sophisticated attacks that single-purpose tools miss.

Yet this comprehensive protection was locked behind enterprise contracts. Some journalists had access, while many others did not. Startups building trust features couldn't afford our platform. The nonprofit fighting disinformation relied on us to run things for them when time permitted.

We faced a paradox: our platform was simultaneously too powerful and not powerful enough.

Too powerful because its enterprise-grade capabilities — designed for air-gapped environments as well as on-premise and cloud deployments — were overkill for a developer who just needed to verify an image.

Not powerful enough because even with our best efforts, our 50-person team could only imagine and build a fraction of the purpose-built integrations where deepfake detection was desperately needed.

We built the detection engine. We were lacking a broad distribution network.

Trusting Developers

The turning point came during a strategy session where someone asked: "What if instead of building every integration ourselves, we enabled thousands of developers to build them?"

The room went quiet. It was both obvious and radical.

Obvious because developers have always been force multipliers. They see problems we do not. They serve communities we cannot reach. They build solutions we never previously imagined.

Radical because it meant reimagining everything — our infrastructure, our business model, our entire approach to fighting deepfakes.

We did not simply want to just expose our API. We wanted to make deepfake detection as simple as sending an SMS with Twilio or processing a payment with Stripe.

Two lines of code. That's it.

This meant:

• Rearchitecting our platform for web-scale without sacrificing accuracy
• Creating SDKs that felt native to developers, not bolted-on
• Building documentation that assumed nothing and explained everything
• Designing pricing that let developers grow and experiment without commitment

The free tier — 50 detections per month — was particularly contentious internally. Yet we kept coming back to our mission. If we truly wanted to enable trust everywhere, we couldn't gatekeep access behind enterprise contracts.

Context-Aware Detection: Our Bet on the Future

As we prepared for launch, our research team had been working on something special: context-aware detection that looks beyond just faces to analyze entire images holistically. It was computationally expensive and technically complex, blending many different concurrent techniques to work in concert with each other.

The safe play was to keep it enterprise-only and away from the newly-introduced free tier. That immediately felt like betraying the vision. If we were asking developers to build the future of trust with us, they deserved our best technology, not a watered-down version.

So we included it. Every developer, even on the free tier, gets access to the same cutting-edge detection our Fortune 500 clients use.

Furthering Our Mission

We measure API success differently than traditional metrics. Yes, we track calls and conversions. But what matters more is coverage — how many communication channels, platforms, and communities now have deepfake detection built in.

Every developer who integrates our API becomes part of a global immune system against digital deception. They are not just using our technology; they are extending it into corners of the internet we'd never reach alone.

Opening our API wasn't abandoning our enterprise focus — it was expanding our definition of "enterprise." Because in an AI-powered world, every platform is critical infrastructure. Every communication channel matters. Every developer is on the front lines.

Our 50-person team built world-class detection. But thousands of developers will build the world's defense.

This is how we truly enable trust in an AI-powered world. Not by protecting a few hundred organizations, but by empowering every developer to protect their domain.

The API has been live for some time now. The documentation is ready. The free tier is waiting. But more importantly, the mission needs you.

Because deepfakes don't discriminate. Neither should protection.

Build with our team and extend the reach of deepfake detection beyond anything we previously thought possible. Help us put deepfake detection everywhere it needs to be — which is everywhere, period.

Two lines of code. Infinite possibilities. One shared mission.

Let's build the trust infrastructure for the AI age, together.