When the call came, Tarini Padmanabhuni’s grandfather believed he was talking to his brother. The voice on the other end of the line said his brother had been kidnapped and that the only way to get him back was to pay a ransom. Her grandfather paid, only to learn later that his brother had been somewhere else entirely, with no clue any of it was happening. The voice, it turned out, was a deepfake: an AI-generated imitation of his brother’s.

“What stayed with me wasn’t the money,” Padmanabhuni says of the incident. “It was that he had no way of telling.”

That was about two years ago. Today, she says, DetectifAI, the San Francisco-based company she founded, aims to ensure that others can’t be hoodwinked the same way.

It’s a big and growing problem, and a market to match. According to the FBI, Americans lost close to $900 million to AI-driven scams last year, up 24% from 2024. People 60 and older lost twice as much as those aged 50 to 59.

There’s no shortage of competition in deepfake voice detection, from companies such as Reality Defender, Pindrop, Resemble AI, Microsoft Azure AI Content Safety, and Nuance (which Microsoft also owns). But today’s detection products, Padmanabhuni argues, run in the cloud on remote servers, so phone makers can’t build them directly into their devices, leaving the person being targeted with little in the way of defense.

Rather than shrinking large cloud models to fit on a phone, as some companies do, DetectifAI says it designs compact AI models from the start that are small enough to run inside a smartphone’s operating system. The aim is to deliver an instant verdict on whether a voice is AI-generated during calls, in voice messages, and in other audio, without the audio ever leaving the device.

DetectifAI is selling first to phone manufacturers, licensing its software tools so that detection can ship as a built-in feature of the phone’s operating system. Her analogy is AT&T’s role in the original iPhone launch, when the carrier’s exclusive deal set it apart from its rivals: the first phone maker to ship DetectifAI will gain an edge over competitors, she argues, and deepfake detection will become a standard spec, like camera resolution.

The core of the product is DetectifAI’s software development kit (SDK), a package of code other companies can build into their products and can be licensed through existing channels. Padmanabhuni says a secondary revenue stream will come from licensing the technology to businesses and fraud-prevention firms.

In the meantime, the startup already has early revenue, according to Padmanabhuni, and handles more than 100,000 calls a month for financial institutions in India. Those calls are placed by AI voice agents that handle debt collections and follow up on loan documents, with deepfake detection and speaker verification (confirming that callers are who they claim to be) on every call. She declined to name customers, citing confidentiality agreements.

Padmanabhuni says she began working in machine learning at age 12 and later studied cyber-physical systems (technology that links software with physical machinery) at Manipal Institute of Technology in India, where she says she became the youngest team lead of what she describes as India’s first driverless racecar division in Formula Student, an international student engineering competition.

Asked about the most rewarding moment for the startup so far, she points to a small WhatsApp beta test in which users forward suspicious voice notes and get back an assessment of whether they’re real. One tester, whose own relatives had been scammed, called to say they would pay for it without hesitation. “My grandfather didn’t have that,” she says.

DetectifAI has so far raised a small seed amount from investors Josh Constine (formerly an editor at TechCrunch) and Manohar Kamath, a principal at the consulting services firm KM Growth. The outfit is one of the startups vetted by TechCrunch’s editorial team to compete in its prestigious Startup Battlefield competition, taking place at TechCrunch Disrupt October 13 to 15 in downtown San Francisco.

For decades, commercial fusion power has seemed perpetually out of reach. Now two companies are building toward something much more concrete: putting fusion-generated electricity on the grid.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is building SPARC, a demonstration fusion machine intended to pave the way for its first commercial power plant, ARC. Helion is developing Orion, a 50-megawatt fusion power plant intended to supply electricity to Microsoft beginning in 2028.

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, CFS co-founder and chief science officer Brandon Sorbom and Helion founder and CEO David Kirtley will take the Smart Systems Stage for “Bringing Fusion to the Grid.” They’ll discuss the breakthroughs moving fusion forward, the challenges that remain, and what it will take to deliver fusion power to the grid at scale.

Want to hear what stands between today’s fusion breakthroughs and commercial power? Grab your pass and bring your co-founder, partner, or peer for 50% off their pass. Discover the insights shaping the future of fusion, together.

Moving fusion from science to commercial power

Sorbom co-founded CFS in 2018 with the goal of commercializing fusion energy in time to help combat climate change. As chief science officer, he leads the company’s scientific direction and R&D and helps advance the design of ARC. The idea has roots in his work at MIT, where Sorbom was lead author of the paper proposing the original ARC design while earning his Ph.D. in nuclear science and engineering.

Today, CFS is working toward ARC through SPARC, the company’s demonstration fusion machine. In April, CFS became the first fusion company to apply to PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. wholesale electricity market — a necessary step toward eventually connecting ARC to the grid. In July, the company raised another $1 billion, bringing its total funding to $4 billion.

For founders and technology leaders, Sorbom brings a perspective that spans the journey from academic research to designing a commercial fusion power plant, and the scientific and engineering challenges that have to be solved along the way.

How do you turn decades of fusion research into commercial power? Secure your Disrupt pass and grab a second at 50% off to hear from one of the scientists working to make that transition.

Putting fusion power to the test

Kirtley founded Helion to develop fusion technology that could ultimately deliver electricity at commercial scale. An NSF and NASA Advanced Concepts Fellow, he has expertise in high-Beta plasmas for energy and space propulsion applications and today leads Helion as it works toward commercial fusion power.

In February, Helion announced that its Polaris prototype had heated plasma to 150 million degrees Celsius. The company is now developing Orion, a 50-megawatt fusion power plant intended to supply electricity to Microsoft as early as 2028. In June, Helion announced a key regulatory milestone on the path to building and operating the plant. Its Series G funding round, initially announced at $465 million in June, closed at $500 million in September.

That timeline puts the questions at the heart of the Disrupt session into sharp focus. Scientific milestones matter, but commercial fusion also has to make the leap to a functioning power plant capable of reliably delivering electricity to customers.

What will it take to turn fusion milestones into electricity on the grid? Register for Disrupt and bring someone with you at 50% off to hear Kirtley’s perspective on the work still ahead.

Learn what still stands between fusion and the grid at Disrupt 2026

CFS and Helion are pursuing different approaches to fusion, but both are confronting the challenge at the center of this session: moving from scientific and engineering progress to commercial power.

At Disrupt, Sorbom and Kirtley will bring firsthand experience building companies around that transition. For founders, investors, and technology leaders, their conversation offers a chance to hear what is moving fusion closer to commercialization, which challenges remain, and what it will take to bring fusion power to the grid at scale.

Their session is one of 200+ sessions across six industry stages, roundtables and breakouts at Disrupt, October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco. More than 10,000 founders, investors, operators and tech leaders are expected, along with 250+ speakers and 300+ exhibiting startups. Beyond the agenda, matchmaking, dealmaking and networking create opportunities to connect with the founders, investors and builders shaping what comes next.

Fusion has spent decades as the energy technology of the future. Hear from two leaders working to bring it closer to the grid. These are the final days to grab your pass and get a second of the same type at 50% off.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reportedly told its agents and support staff that their personal information was stolen in a recent cyberattack that targeted the bureau’s job application portal.

It’s the bureau’s first acknowledgement that the personal information of FBI agents was taken in the breach. The FBI has not publicly confirmed a breach beyond a statement last week, in which it said it was aware that a hacking group had claimed a cyberattack, but that the theft of data was “still undetermined.”

As reported by MS NOW reporter Ken Dilanian over the weekend, the FBI has since declared a “cyber security incident” in an internal notification to staff, telling employees that their names, addresses, job titles, and their Social Security numbers were exposed.

Several media outlets have since confirmed that some of the stolen data included medical information, such as records relating to blood and urine samples, as well as psychiatric reports. 

The hacking group called ShinyHunters previously told TechCrunch that they “have data on mostly all of FBI,” and a “substantial” amount of information on applicants who applied through the FBIJobs.gov portal. The hackers broke in by exploiting a vulnerability in an Oracle PeopleSoft server, which hosts reams of human resources information on agents and now-employees who applied through the portal.

The hackers told TechCrunch that they are not seeking a financial ransom, but are demanding the correction of an earlier FBI-issued report, which they say misrepresents their activities.

Justin Sherman, a national security expert, called the data breach a “counterintelligence disaster” for the U.S. government in a blog post for Lawfare. He warned that the data theft would “expose thousands of FBI personnel to profiling, phishing, foreign intelligence approaches, and much more.”

While the bureau has notified employees, it’s less clear if the FBI has disclosed the incident to lawmakers in Congress who have oversight of the FBI. Under federal law, alerting Congress is required when an intrusion meets the bar of a “major incident” — such as if a data breach involves the theft of personally identifiable information that is “likely to result in demonstrable harm” to U.S. national security. 

It’s likely that bureau lawyers are trying to figure that out right now. If a disclosure is required, it would be the FBI’s second known notification to lawmakers this year about a data breach, after hackers, suspected to be Chinese, broke into a surveillance system that exposed targets of FBI surveillance and investigations earlier this year.

A spokesperson for the FBI did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment on Monday, and a White House spokesperson also did not respond to an email asking if the bureau had declared a major incident.

Representatives for several lawmakers whose jurisdictions cover oversight of the FBI did not have any immediate answers. 

ABC News reports that the FBI’s job site has been the primary way to apply for a job with the bureau since 2017. The portal remains down at the time of publication.

Do you work at the FBI and have received a notice about the data breach? We want to hear from you. You can contact this reporter securely on Signal at zackwhittaker.1337, or reach him by email at zack.whittaker@techcrunch.com.