Deepfake or Deep Fake Concept as a symbol for misrepresenting or identity theft or faking identification and misrepresentation in a 3D illustration style.

Clarity raises $16M to fight deepfakes through detection

by with No Comment Tech

Deepfake or Deep Fake Concept as a symbol for misrepresenting or identity theft or faking identification and misrepresentation in a 3D illustration style.

Image Credits: wildpixel (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Fake porn of Taylor Swift. Photorealistic — but fictionalized — images of Gaza. The list of disconcerting deepfakes goes on, and — as deepfake-creating tools grow easier and cheaper to use — the waves of fakes are coming faster and fiercer.

According to a recent Pew Center poll, about two-thirds of Americans (66%) say they at least sometimes come across altered videos and images that are intended to mislead, with 15% encountering them often. In a separate survey of AI experts by Axios and Syracuse University, 62% said that misinformation will be the biggest challenge to maintaining the authenticity and credibility of news in an era of AI-generated content.

So what’s the answer? Is there one?

If you talk with folks like Michael Matias, a cybersecurity specialist and the co-founder and CEO of Clarity, they’ll tell you it’s deepfake detectors. Matias started Clarity with Gil Avriel and Natalie Fridman in 2022, with the goal of developing technology to spot AI-manipulated media — mainly video and audio.

Clarity is among the many vendors large and small racing to develop deepfake-spotting tools. Others include Reality Defender, which offers a platform to isolate text, video and image deepfakes, and Sentinel, which focuses on deepfaked images and videos.

It’s difficult, actually, to distinguish Clarity’s offerings from the others out there — at least for this writer. Like rival vendors, Clarity maintains a scanning tool available via an app and API that leverages several AI models trained to identify patterns in videos, image and audio deepface creation techniques. In addition, Clarity provides a form of watermarking that customers can use to indicate their content is legitimate.

But Matias insists that the differentiators lie not above but beneath the surface, with Clarity’s rapid response to new types of deepfakes.

“At its core, Clarity is leveraging AI but operating as a cybersecurity company,” Matias said. “Clarity treats deepfakes as viruses, acting like pathogens that quickly fork and replicate. As such, its solution was also built to fork and replicate to maintain adaptivity and resiliency … The team built infrastructure and AI models dedicated to accomplishing the ask.”

Of course, precision in the deepfakes detection realm is a moving target. Even with the best expertise and tech stack money can buy, it’s an impossible game to win considering the rate at which GenAI, deepfake-creating apps are improving. That’s perhaps why some major players — including Google, Microsoft and AWS — are embracing more sophisticated watermarking and provenance metadata as alternative — albeit imperfect — deepfake-fighting measures.

Be that as it may, Clarity hasn’t had any trouble attracting backing. The New York-based, 13-employee startup recently closed a $16 million seed round co-led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Secret Chord Ventures, Ascend Ventures and Flying Fish Partners.

And it appears to have carved out a niche. Initially, Clarity — which sells subscription as well as pay-as-you-go plans — sought customers in news publishers and the public sector, including the Israeli government. (Matias claims that Clarity is helping authenticate and verify videos coming out of the Israel-Hamas conflict.) But it’s since expanded to identity verification providers and other, unnamed “large enterprises.”

“This is a fast-paced arms race, just like traditional cybersecurity,” Matias said. “Any company that wants to tackle deepfakes needs to move as fast as those creating and spreading them are.”

Co-founders Alesandro Larrazabal and Christina LaMontagne / Clarity Pediatrics

Clarity Pediatrics raises $10M for treating ADHD and other chronic childhood conditions

by with No Comment Tech

Co-founders Alesandro Larrazabal and Christina LaMontagne / Clarity Pediatrics

Image Credits: Clarity Pediatrics

Raising young kids who have been diagnosed with, or are suspected of having, ADHD can be challenging. Some children with this condition may have difficulties completing school work or grow easily frustrated and throw tantrums.

Parents who try to turn to professionals for help are often shocked to learn that due to a nationwide shortage of psychologists, it can take as long as nearly a year to get diagnosed and start seeing a therapist. And that’s not even mentioning the high cost of treatment, which can add up to thousands of dollars a year for out-of-network care.

Clarity Pediatrics, a chronic care startup founded in 2021, says it can reduce the wait time for receiving a diagnosis and beginning ADHD therapy from many months to a couple of days, for an average $15 co-pay per session.

The company’s secret sauce is that instead of providing individual therapy to children, the startup runs eight-week group therapy sessions for parents of newly or previously diagnosed kids.

Clarity chose to offer behavioral parent training (BPT) for one simple reason: the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends it for families of children ages five to 12 with mild-to-moderate ADHD. Since young kids are not mature enough to change on their own, BPT teaches parents strategies and skills to help their children focus in school and control emotional outbursts.

“There is no evidence that one-to-one therapy is effective for young kids with ADHD,” said Clarity’s CEO and co-founder Christina LaMontagne.

Over the last 18 months, Clarity has provided online care to thousands of families in California, and it plans to use $10 million in seed funds it raised from Rethink Impact, with participation from Homebrew and Maverick Ventures, to expend its services to other states in 2024.

Clarity is certainly not alone in trying to solve the problem of the lack of therapists for children. Startups like Brightline, Little Otter and Bend Health offer online pediatric mental health services, including ADHD.

For now, Clarity is solely focused on treating ADHD in kids ages five to 12 by providing diagnosis, therapy and prescriptions, but the company has plans to eventually offer healthcare for low-complexity pediatric chronic conditions like asthma, allergies and obesity.

Prior to founding Clarity, LaMontagne was the chief operating officer at Pill Club and a corporate development executive at Johnson & Johnson. The company’s co-founder, Dr. Alesandro Larrazabal, is a pediatrician who was trained at UCSF and Stanford and was in charge of specialty services at Kaiser Permanente.

Clarity’s seed round also included investments from January Ventures, Vamos Ventures, Alumni Ventures and City Light VC.

Heidi Patel, a managing partner at Rethink Impact, said she invested in Clarity because the incidence rate of chronic disease in children has tripled over the last 40 years, but the medical system doesn’t have enough specialists to treat these kids.

“There’s a really long wait time, and then even if you get a diagnosis, treatments are often not available, which is why 80% of kids are left completely untreated,” she said. “With Clarity, you’re getting a full basket of care.”