Backing Doppel: Architecting trust in an age of AI-powered threats

Despite decades of cybersecurity innovation, the most persistent vulnerability remains the same: people. Social engineering attacks—phishing, impersonation scams, deepfakes—account for 68% of all breaches, far eclipsing other vectors. And in the era of generative AI, attackers are armed with new superpowers: the ability to produce hyper-personalized, multi-channel attacks at massive scale. Legacy cybersecurity tools weren’t built for this reality. They’re reactive, fragmented, and manual—forcing security teams to play endless whack-a-mole with individual attacks across a sprawling digital landscape.

This is where Doppel steps in. Doppel is pioneering a new category of cybersecurity for an era in which authenticity is under siege: delivering proactive, offensive, and AI-powered defense against social engineering. The AI-native Doppel Vision platform continuously scans both the open and dark web, ingesting millions of data points—domains, social profiles, emails, ads, and more. Leveraging proprietary machine learning models and fine-tuned AI agents developed in collaboration with OpenAI, Doppel autonomously identifies threats across all vectors and enforces takedowns.

Doppel’s key advantage lies in its ability to consolidate fragmented data into a single, continuously evolving threat map of attacker infrastructure. This enables Doppel to detect attacker trends in real time and proactively neutralize threats across the many disparate vectors. By dismantling this infrastructure at its source, Doppel makes future campaigns more difficult and expensive for adversaries, while allowing customers to stay ahead of emerging threats.

The Doppel Vision platform capabilities span a dynamic range, protecting brands and individual executives from impersonation and deepfakes, as well as safeguarding employees and customers from phishing and fraud.

Why we invested

At Bessemer, we are excited to lead Doppel’s $35 million Series B to accelerate its mission to protect human authenticity in an AI era.

An estimated 90% of cyberattacks target people, not systems, and 95% of data breaches involve social engineering or human error. Yet most security tools remain stuck in a reactive mindset—relying on manual enforcement, slow remediation, and limited visibility.

Co-founders Kevin Tian (CEO) and Rahul Madduluri (CTO) met as engineers at Uber, where they built the ML infrastructure behind intelligent dispatch systems. Their inspiration for Doppel began during the NFT boom, where early crypto adopters were frequent targets for scams and impersonation. The scope of the problem—and opportunity—quickly expanded, and their impact and traction are well underway. For example, customers have used Doppel to remove thousands of fraudulent domains and fake accounts, reducing enforcement costs by over 80% compared to traditional legal processes.

In the past year alone, Doppel has more than tripled in scale, driven by both new module launches in the Vision platform and massive expansion across their Fortune 500 and enterprise customer base. As revenue and usage grow, we’re continuing to see customers across different industries—from finance and healthcare to defense and media, and beyond—use Doppel to help keep their businesses secure from social engineering attacks.

“AI poses a real and urgent threat to human authenticity,” says Kevin. “At Doppel, we’re building the first platform purpose-built to stop it.”

The future of trust

Category creation is never easy. Each paradigm shift comes with new problems for technology to solve. Doppel is responding to these emerging threats and building new solutions with a level of speed and technical clarity that continues to impress us. And most important? The market pull is undeniable.

Doppel isn’t just stopping threats—it’s building the infrastructure for trust in a world where deception is increasingly automated. We’re proud to partner with Kevin, Rahul, and the Doppel team as they build the standard for AI-powered social engineering defense.

Want to protect your brand and your people? Book a demo with Doppel.