Fighting Deepfakes With AI: Meet Contrails AI.

Bengaluru-based trust and safety startup Contrails AI has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding from Huddle Ventures and the Indian Angel Network (IAN Group) to expand its multimodal deepfake detection platform. The startup is building advanced AI systems that can detect synthetic media, prevent scams and tackle the growing wave of misinformation spreading across digital ecosystems. As the line between real and artificial content blurs, Contrails AI’s mission is both urgent and ambitious: to become the trust infrastructure of the generative AI era.

Why a startup like Contrails AI Matters ? The Deepfake and Trust Crisis

In recent years, deepfakes and AI-generated scams have evolved from fringe curiosities into a global safety threat. From fraudulent investment pitches to cloned celebrity endorsements and manipulated political speeches, synthetic media is now capable of deceiving millions at scale.

India, one of the world’s largest digital audiences, is witnessing this crisis firsthand. Deepfake videos and AI voice scams have begun infiltrating entertainment, politics and even banking. In a striking development, several Bollywood actors: including Amitabh Bachchan, Anil Kapoor, and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan approached the Delhi High Court to protect their personality rights and likeness from being exploited through AI-generated videos. The move highlights how even public figures are grappling with the fallout of generative technologies gone unchecked.

Contrails AI enters this turbulent landscape with a clear focus: help organizations and individuals identify what’s real, what’s synthetic and what’s safe to trust.

What Is Contrails AI ? The Multimodal Detection Engine

Contrails AI describes itself as a trust and safety technology company using AI to help organizations detect deepfakes, prevent scams and mitigate digital risks. Its platform is built around a proprietary multimodal detection engine that analyzes video, audio, images and text simultaneously, allowing it to identify synthetic or manipulated content with high precision.

The system doesn’t just scan for visual inconsistencies. It cross-verifies signals across modalities: tone, cadence, lighting, pixel noise and contextual cues. All of this to detect subtle signs of fabrication that might evade traditional models. This multi-signal approach allows Contrails AI to serve diverse use cases:

• Media and entertainment: authenticating videos and protecting intellectual property.
• Financial services: preventing voice-cloned scams and fraudulent calls.
• Social media platforms: flagging misinformation, policy violations and synthetic content.
• Enterprise and government: ensuring integrity in digital communication and compliance systems.

Behind this architecture is a philosophy rooted in trust by verification. In a world where anyone can create realistic audio-visual content using generative models, Contrails AI’s technology aims to give organizations a scalable, intelligent defense mechanism.

The Funding Round of Contrails AI. Building the Trust Infrastructure for AI

The $1 million pre-seed round was co-led by Huddle Ventures and IAN Group, two of India’s most active early-stage investors. The fresh capital will fuel Contrails AI’s product development, expand its data partnerships and support early deployments with clients across sectors such as media, fintech and enterprise communication.

For Huddle Ventures and IAN Group, the investment underscores a broader conviction: trust and safety tools will be as essential to AI as cybersecurity is to the internet.

The funds will also help the startup scale its engineering team, strengthen R&D for multimodal models and establish pilot programs in global markets including the United States and Europe where regulatory frameworks around deepfakes and content authenticity are rapidly taking shape. Contrails AI’s leadership has positioned the company as part of a new wave of AI infrastructure startups that enable safe adoption of generative technologies rather than competing against them.

Huge Market Opportunity: When Truth Needs Technology

The rise of generative AI has democratized creation but destabilized verification. With tools like Sora, Midjourney and voice-cloning software becoming widely accessible, the volume of synthetic content online is exploding. Industry analysts estimate that by 2026, 90 percent of online content will have some degree of AI generation, making authenticity detection a foundational challenge for platforms, regulators and users alike.

The business opportunity is enormous. Enterprises, banks, media companies and governments all face the same question: how can we trust what we see and hear?

That’s where Contrails AI fits in:by offering detection as a service. Its multimodal engine can integrate with enterprise systems and social platforms to flag synthetic media in real time, providing risk scores, alerts and policy compliance checks. As misinformation becomes a national security and social stability issue, the need for AI-powered trust solutions has moved from optional to critical. Contrails AI’s early traction suggests that the next big frontier in artificial intelligence isn’t just creation, it’s authentication.

Strengths and Differentiation of Contrails AI

Contrails AI stands out for combining deep technical sophistication with a mission rooted in ethics and safety. Its multimodal detection approach allows it to cross-verify multiple data layers, offering far greater accuracy than single-modality deepfake detectors.

Equally important is its agentic workflow design, a system of AI “agents” that not only detect anomalies but also categorize risk and recommend actions for moderation or investigation. This makes it a scalable tool for platforms dealing with thousands of incidents daily.

Deepfakes in India: A Wake-Up Call for the Entertainment Industry

Contrails AI’s emergence comes at a moment when the deepfake threat has become deeply personal for India’s entertainment industry. Viral deepfakes featuring Bollywood celebrities triggered outrage and legal action. Several high-profile figures, including Amitabh Bachchan, Anil Kapoor and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, approached courts to safeguard their likeness, voices and gestures from being misused in AI-generated videos and ads. To fight this Akshay Kumar approached the Bombay High Court seeking protection of his personality rights.

This episode underscored how synthetic media is no longer a hypothetical risk, it’s an immediate reputational, legal and cultural challenge. It also emphasized the urgency for detection frameworks capable of distinguishing authentic content from digital impersonation. Startups like Contrails AI are stepping into that gap, building the technological backbone for content authenticity in an age when virality can outpace verification.

Looking Ahead on Contrails AI’s Roadmap

With its pre-seed funding secured, Contrails AI aims to scale its detection infrastructure and launch pilot programs across sectors prone to deepfake misuse, from digital banking to content moderation.

The company is expanding its R&D focus on multilingual, multi-accent deepfake detection, an area particularly relevant to India’s diverse linguistic landscape. It’s also developing partnerships with media organizations and enterprise security providers to deploy its API at scale. In the longer term, Contrails AI envisions becoming a trusted layer of verification integrated into every platform that hosts or distributes user-generated content, a kind of “truth API” for the generative internet.

Contrails AI’s Place in the Future of Digital Trust

The rise of generative AI has made it easier than ever to create and to deceive. As the internet tilts toward synthetic realities, the next wave of innovation will hinge on how well we can verify authenticity. Contrails AI’s $1 million pre-seed raise isn’t just a funding milestone; it’s part of a global movement to rebuild the digital world’s trust architecture.

By fusing advanced multimodal AI with real-world risk understanding, the company is crafting the infrastructure that will allow humans and machines to know what’s real again. In an era where seeing isn’t believing, detection is becoming the new foundation of truth.