Reken

Reken CEO Shuman Ghosemajumder and Ken Nickerson, partner at Maverix Private Equity, joined the RBC Disruptors podcast last week, hosted by John Stackhouse, SVP at RBC and Sonia Sennik, CEO of Creative Destruction Lab. Some of the key points from the discussion: 1. Generative AI enables criminals to automate fraud, accelerating and scaling scams that previously needed human fraudsters, such as phone calls and email social engineering. Unlike enterprises that struggle with AI hallucinations, fraudsters embrace them — because deception is the goal. 2. Traditional digital verification methods are failing. The information security?industry has learned from the anti-fraud industry and adopted the concept of "zero trust", where trust is never assumed and continuously validated. 3. Despite the risks, AI itself is also the key to the solution, as new technologies are being built to keep the world safe. Listen to the podcast at: https://lnkd.in/gBFk5vZi

Reken CEO Shuman Ghosemajumder will be speaking at the HumanX AI conference next week in Las Vegas. He will be discussing how DeepSeek AI, Meta's Llama, and other open source AI models are being used to enhance cybercriminal capabilities, and what we can be done to protect companies and societies. Shuman will also speak on a panel about how generative AI is transforming cybersecurity and fraud, with Vijay Balasubramaniyan, co-founder & CEO at Pindrop, and Galina Antova, co-founder & board member at Claroty, moderated by John Furrier, co-founder & CEO at SiliconANGLE & theCUBE. Other featured speakers at the conference include Kamala Harris, 49th Vice President of the United States and former White House AI Czar; Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox; Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake; Marcie Vu, Partner at Greycroft; Wesley Chan, co-founder & Managing Partner of FPV Ventures; Pegah Ebrahimi, co-founder & Managing Partner of FPV Ventures; Ian Sigalow, co-founder & Managing Partner at Greycroft; Lawrence M. Chu, co-chair of Global M&A at Goodwin; Douwe Kiela, co-founder & CEO of Contextual AI; and Arthur Mensch, co-founder & CEO of Mistral AI.

At SXSW next week, Inc. Magazine is hosting Founders House, featuring actor and director Seth Rogen, actor Lili Reinhart, former World No. 1 tennis player Andy Roddick, SweetGreen co-founder Nic Jammet, designer Rebecca Minkoff, and other founders and leaders. Reken co-founder Shuman Ghosemajumder will be speaking on March 9 along with Ben Goodwin, co-founder of OLIPOP PBC, on the future of work.

Reken CEO Shuman Ghosemajumder spoke to The Globe and Mail about AI-generated scams, and how AI is "the ultimate fraud machine". Article summary: 1. Scammers are increasingly using AI-generated deepfakes to impersonate executives, employees, and family members. 2. Deepfake fraud grew by 3,000% between 2022 and 2023. 3. Realistic deepfake technology is now cheap and widely available. 4. As AI improves, scams will become even harder to detect. 5. Detection of AI content alone does not solve the problem. Read the full article by Joe Castaldo and Alexandra Posadzki below.

We are excited to share that Reken CEO Shuman Ghosemajumder has been named a Senior Fellow at the University of Toronto - Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. He joins an influential community of Fellows including former Prime Ministers and other prominent government, business, and policy leaders. At Reken, we are building a cybersecurity platform to defend against AI-powered threats. As we do this, we want to help educate organizations and societies to understand these issues and implement effective approaches. Reken’s ongoing work will add to the Munk School’s leadership in shaping policy for artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and entrepreneurship.

This week’s Economist cover story discusses scams and fraud, and how AI will make these problems much worse. From the article: “Online scamming compares in size and scope to the illegal drug industry [...] A global industry that steals over $500bn a year from victims all around the world" "In Singapore scams have become the most common felony. The UN says that in 2023 the industry employed just under 250,000 people in Cambodia and Myanmar; another estimate puts the number of workers worldwide at 1.5m.” “AI will turbocharge this.” The Internet and AI make scams and fraud more widespread than ever. We need new, advanced cybersecurity and AI to protect against this. This is why we founded Reken. If you’d like to join us on this critical mission, email us at [email protected].

Reken CEO Shuman Ghosemajumder spoke with Bloomberg News about DeepSeek AI and its implications for AI around the world. From the article: “Every country in the world could have that kind of a project going on, if they can acquire the talent and be able to work on it, of course. The rest of the industry is going to learn from this,” said Shuman Ghosemajumder, co-founder and CEO of Reken, a San Francisco-based AI startup. DeepSeek is helping the industry realize trends we both predicted and observed at Reken since before we started: 1. Models won’t be as expensive to build as people thought 2. Costs for companies leveraging AI will go down over time 3. Reliance on specific hardware stacks will decrease 4. AI will be available to anyone globally, including cybercriminals 5. Cybercriminals will leverage AI to exponentially scale fraud DeepSeek represents an inflection point that will accelerate each of these trends.

Congratulations to Reken summer business analyst Madeleine Wu on winning the World Universities Debating Championship! Madeleine won the championship, held in Panama City, Panama with her partner Ryan Lafferty, competing for Dartmouth College. They placed first among 232 teams from universities around the world, defeating the University of Oxford, the University of Sydney, and Bates College in the Grand Final. It was the first time that Dartmouth has ever won the World Championship, and the first time in seven years that a US team has won. Madeleine joined Reken after she stood out for being the youngest person to ever win the North American Universities Debating Championship. Before that, she won the World Schools Debating Championship as a high school student. Congratulations again to Madeleine and Ryan, and the Dartmouth College debating team!

We are excited to announce that Reken CEO Shuman Ghosemajumder is joining an outstanding lineup of AI leaders speaking at the HumanX AI conference in Las Vegas in March. Shuman will be speaking about how AI is transforming the approach of both cybersecurity defenders and cybercriminal attackers, and what enterprise and individuals need to do to protect themselves against evolving threats. Full agenda and registration at: humanx.co

Just published: an excellent new report on how AI is changing society. "The Generative Identity Initiative: Exploring Generative AI’s Impact on Cognition, Society, and the Future" examines how generative AI is transforming and interacting with people and shaping our future. Congratulations to author Gabrielle Tran, principal investigator Eric Davis, and the Institute for Security and Technology (IST) for the extensive research and sessions that went into this. We were delighted to have Reken CEO Shuman Ghosemajumder contribute to this effort. Thank you also to other working group members, contributors, and supporters including Michelle Barsa, Omidyar Network, Philip Reiner, Steven M. Kelly, CISSP, Aaron Shull, Adam Fivenson, Beatrice Reaud, Bernie Hogan, Chloe Autio, Emma Hollingsworth, Fatima Faisal Khan, Herbert Lin, Jodi Halpern MD, PhD, Lauren Bean Buitta, Lillian Ilsley-Greene, Maxi Heitmayer, Dr. Megan K McBride, Michael Pozmantier, Michael Rich, Mickey McManus, Mike Parent, PhD MBA, Mounir Ibrahim, Nichole Argo, Olya Gurevich, Rachel Bowen, Sarah Papazoglakis, PhD, CIPT/CIPM, Sherry Turkle, Sophia Mauro, Vaishnavi J, Vivienne Ming, Amanda McCroskery, Derek Slater, Betsy Masiello, Igor Grossmann.