Reken

Reken CEO Shuman Ghosemajumder spoke in a private roundtable on AI policy at the annual US-Canada Summit, along with leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, IBM, Microsoft, and other companies, as well as government leaders. As AI transforms organizations and societies, thoughtful policies need to be shaped, especially in light of cybercrime, misinformation, and fraud enabled by new technologies. Thank you and congratulations to Ian Bremmer, Gerald Butts, Dev Saxena, and the whole team at Eurasia Group and BMO for hosting another successful US-Canada Summit, and helping deepen this essential cross-border relationship.

This week, Reken CEO Shuman Ghosemajumder will speak about AI challenges to university presidents from across the country, at EAB's Presidential Experience Lab at NVIDIA headquarters. Other speakers include NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky, The Burning Glass Institute President Matt Sigelman, and incoming University of Arizona Provost Joseph Glover. AI is going to have an unprecedented impact on the future of society, and how universities utilize and invest in AI will play a key role in this. This event, for university presidents and chancellors creating AI strategies for their institutions, starts tomorrow.

Warren Buffett on AI this morning: "When you think about the potential for scamming people... if I was interested in investing in scamming, it’s gonna be the growth industry of all time and it’s enabled, in a way, by AI." He's right, and it's the continuation of the trend of cybercriminals getting more sophisticated for two decades. Gen AI gives cybercriminals their most powerful tool to scale scams, and AI-enabled fraud is the biggest security threat related to AI. This is why we founded Reken. Full article on CNBC: https://lnkd.in/g3A8RPnS

One of the highlights of the C100 Summit was our AI panel. It captivated attendees and sparked a conversation that could have easily continued for another hour. Our experts - Jenna Zuschlag Misener (The Logic), Taylor Malmsheimer (Section), Shuman Ghosemajumder (Reken) and Gregory Shove (Section) - delved into the essence of integrating AI into core business strategies, illuminating pathways to enhance decision-making, drive innovation, optimize operations, and embrace data-driven decisions to propel companies forward. Key takeaways emphasized the importance of using AI tools wisely to ensure they serve your business goals, the value of transparency with customers about AI utilization, and the strategic deployment of AI to foster transformative changes within organizations. This panel showcased AI's immense potential in transforming business approaches to challenges and opportunities and demonstrated how to stay agile and ahead in a rapidly evolving marketplace. The audience's enthusiasm and engagement underscored the urgency and relevance for Canadian growth founders to embrace AI.   #C100Summit #AIInnovation #BusinessTransformation

We are excited to welcome Suraj Venkata Raman to Reken. Suraj was most recently head of design at Unusual Ventures, where he served in a dual role as creative director for the Unusual brand as well as product design advisor for Unusual portfolio companies. Prior to Unusual, he led product design at CloudKnox, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2021. He was also head of design for Shape Security, where he worked for five years leading up to Shape’s $1B acquisition by F5 in 2020. Before his career in tech, Suraj was a designer on many high-profile projects in the entertainment industry, including Nickelodeon’s Tak, the feature film Alpha and Omega, and the Emmy award-winning PBS show WordWorld. Suraj has also led prominent pro bono design projects, including for the global NGO TeachAids, where he designed the UX for the Concussion Story Wall, a Sharecare Emmy award-winning concussion education platform; and for CoviDB, a coronavirus resource database.

Takeaways from interview with Reken CEO Shuman Ghosemajumder, reflecting on leading AI at F5, being CTO at Shape Security, and starting the Trust & Safety product team at Google: - Gen AI enables automated fraud at an unprecedented scale - using AI well requires experimentation and exploration - AI is quickly getting integrated into many job functions From an interview with Jaclyn Selby, written by Haley Bierman, for MIT Sloan School of Management.

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Sebastien Soudan to Reken. Sébastien is a renowned leader in data, communications, networking, and security, and has been a key architect of major transnational European Commission software platforms. He was previously co-chief architect for the AI & Data product group at F5, where he helped design the ambitious strategy for building next-generation AI products operating on one of the world’s largest datasets: the 500+ PB/day handled by F5 networking products powering most of the largest websites and apps globally. He was co-founder & CTO of CloudWeaver (Formerly Lyatiss), a pioneering intelligent cloud computing platform that was acquired by F5 in 2015. Sébastien is a past laureate of the Marconi Society Young Scholar prize. The prize is awarded annually to the world’s most outstanding researchers in information technology, early in their careers. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from École normale supérieure de Lyon.

Reken's $10M seed round is featured in the The Wall Street Journal's Morning Download today. Reken CEO Shuman Ghosemajumder discusses the dangers of generative AI fraud and how AI can be used to protect against automated fraud, deepfakes, and disinformation.

Introducing our latest investment, Reken, which is building a new type of AI platform and products to protect against generative AI threats. Reken's mission strongly aligns with our core focus on partnering with companies responsibly leveraging the power of artificial intelligence.   Today, Reken co-founders Shuman Ghosemajumder and Rich Griffiths announce the successful closing of a $10 million seed round led by Greycroft. While at Google, Shape Security, and F5, Shuman and Rich built large-scale AI platforms to defend against sophisticated attacks for some of the world's largest companies. We believe these experiences uniquely position them to build an important company that will help tackle the evolving and increasing challenges presented by generative AI threats.   Safeguarding against generative AI threats is essential for the future of the internet and requires a fundamentally new platform and approach. That's why we are so excited to join the Reken board and embark on the Reken journey with Shuman and Rich alongside FPV Ventures, Firebolt Ventures, Fika Ventures, Omega Venture Partners, Homebrew, and JAZZ Venture Partners.  

We’re delighted to announce the close of Reken's $10M seed round, led by Greycroft and FPV Ventures, joined by Firebolt Ventures, Fika Ventures, Omega Venture Partners, Homebrew, and JAZZ Venture Partners. We’re thrilled to partner with an incredible team of investors – including funds led by longtime friends that I’ve been waiting to work with again since we were all together 20 years ago at Google, helping to build and grow AdSense, AdWords, Gmail, and other foundational products. It's a privilege to be working again with Wesley Chan, Gokul Rajaram, Eva Ho, Hunter Walk, Satya Patel, and Jon Steinback. Marcie Vu from Greycroft helped lead Google’s IPO (in addition to Facebook's, and many others) prior to leading Greycroft in the Bay Area, and we are honored to have her joining our board. Greycroft has a prescient vision of how AI is transforming the world, which aligns perfectly with the insights we have gained over many years working in AI. Generative AI will transform every industry, but it also presents previously unimaginable security and privacy threats. These range from deepfake video, audio, and image disinformation, to sophisticated phishing and fraud, which bypass state-of-the-art cybersecurity. A few months ago, when Rich Griffiths and I began discussing building a world-class company to defend against generative AI-enabled fraud, we were fortunate to have more than 100 great VC firms reach out to us. We knew we needed to create a fundamentally new platform and required partners who understood what it takes to create transformational products and enduring companies, not just the point solutions that are common in enterprise startups. We could not be happier to work with this amazing group. As we've already seen, 2024 is going to be an even bigger year for AI than the last, and we hope our products will help address some of the world’s key challenges with it. If you'd like to join our exceptional team on this critical mission, email us at jobs@reken.ai. Finally, thank you to: Greycroft (Marcie Vu, Mark Terbeek, Dana Settle, Ian Sigalow, Brentt Baltimore, Jen Hilibrand, Meghan Fahy), FPV Ventures (Wesley Chan, Pegah Ebrahimi, Christina L.), Firebolt Ventures (Cherian Mathew), Fika Ventures (Eva Ho, TX Zhuo, Ju-Djuin Csontos), Omega Venture Partners (Gaurav Tewari, Thomas Malone), Homebrew (Hunter Walk, Satya Patel), JAZZ Venture Partners (John Spinale, Andrew Firlik, John F. Harris, Zack Lynch, John Lee), Gokul Rajaram, Jon Steinback, Vishal Vasishth, Aaron Fyke, and many others.