GetReal Security Hires CMO Amid Deepfake Threat Surge

GetReal Security, one of the more visible startups operating at the intersection of cybersecurity and synthetic media defense, has appointed cybersecurity veteran Varun Kohli as its new Chief Marketing Officer. The hire comes as enterprises increasingly find themselves on the receiving end of AI-driven identity attacks — from deepfaked executive video calls to cloned voices used in wire-fraud schemes — and as detection vendors race to capture a rapidly forming market category.

Why a Detection Vendor Is Staffing Up Now

GetReal Security, founded with deep ties to digital forensics pioneer Hany Farid, focuses on detecting manipulated audio, video, and images across enterprise communication channels. The company's platform analyzes content for signs of generative provenance — examining artifacts left by diffusion models, GAN-based face swaps, neural voice cloners, and lip-sync tools — and integrates those signals into security operations workflows.

The CMO appointment is a tell about where the market is heading. Detection technology has historically been sold to platforms (social networks, news organizations) and governments. The new buyer is the enterprise CISO, who is now contending with:

• Deepfake-enabled business email compromise (BEC), where cloned voices authorize fraudulent wire transfers.
• Synthetic video impersonation in Zoom, Teams, and WebEx meetings, including the now-infamous Arup case where a finance worker transferred $25 million after a video call with deepfaked colleagues.
• AI-generated identity documents used to bypass KYC and onboarding flows.
• Voice-phishing campaigns using a few seconds of public audio to clone executives.

Kohli brings prior senior marketing leadership from cybersecurity firms including Symantec and several growth-stage security startups. Bringing a traditional cybersecurity GTM operator into a synthetic media detection company signals that GetReal intends to position itself less as a media-forensics tool and more as a core component of the enterprise security stack — alongside EDR, email security, and identity providers.

The Technical Challenge GetReal Is Selling Against

Detection of synthetic media has become considerably harder over the past 18 months. Modern video models — Sora 2, Veo 3, Runway Gen-4, Kling 2.0 — produce output with temporal coherence and physiological realism (blinking, micro-expressions, vascular shading) that defeats first-generation detectors trained on FaceForensics++ or DFDC datasets. Voice models like ElevenLabs v3 and OpenAI's voice engine can clone a speaker convincingly from under 10 seconds of audio.

GetReal's approach, like competitors Reality Defender, Pindrop, and Truepic, leans on ensemble detection: combining frequency-domain analysis, biometric liveness signals, provenance metadata (C2PA where available), and behavioral cues. The strategic challenge is the cat-and-mouse dynamic — generators improve faster than any single detector can, so vendors increasingly emphasize workflow integration and risk scoring rather than binary real/fake verdicts.

Market Context

The deepfake detection market is projected by multiple analyst firms to grow from roughly $1.5 billion in 2024 to north of $15 billion by 2030, driven largely by enterprise demand. Gartner has predicted that by 2026, 30% of enterprises will no longer consider face biometrics alone reliable for identity verification — a remarkable reversal that creates urgent demand for liveness and synthetic media detection layers.

Funding has followed. Reality Defender raised $33 million in late 2024. Pindrop has surpassed $234 million in total funding. GetReal itself raised $17.5 million in Series A funding led by Forgepoint Capital and Evolution Equity Partners, with strategic participation from Capital One Ventures and others. The CMO hire suggests the company is preparing for a more aggressive enterprise sales push and likely a Series B in the coming year.

What to Watch

Two things will determine whether GetReal and its peers turn into a durable category or get absorbed into existing security suites:

1. Real-time detection in collaboration tools. The Arup-style attacks happen on live video calls. Vendors that can ship low-latency inference inside Zoom/Teams meeting clients will win the most strategic placement.
2. Provenance standards adoption. If C2PA Content Credentials achieve broad capture-side adoption (Sony, Leica, Adobe, OpenAI, Google), detection becomes a complement to verification rather than the primary defense — changing what enterprises buy.

Either way, hiring a seasoned cybersecurity CMO suggests GetReal sees its addressable market shifting from media organizations to the Fortune 1000 — and that the deepfake threat has moved decisively from a content-moderation problem into a security one.

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