Colman saw voice authentication systems mistake computer-generated voices for real ones while at Goldman Sachs, and he now runs Reality Defender, which detects deepfakes on live calls and meetings.
Ben Colman is co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender, a New York, New York, company that detects AI-generated voices, video and images in live calls, meetings and uploaded files.
Studying at Claremont McKenna College
He earned a bachelor's degree at Claremont McKenna College and an MBA at NYU Stern, according to Reality Defender. Early on he interned at Google working on consumer privacy. While finishing graduate school at NYU he co-created PlaceAVote, an early voting platform built on a blockchain.
Working on Security at Goldman Sachs
From 2015 to 2017 he worked in engineering at Goldman Sachs in New York, in the Office of the CIO, where he focused on cybersecurity and blockchain technology, he told Goldman Sachs. He sat near the bank's chief information security officer, Phil Venables, and worked on a single sign-on concept for consumer banks. The bank was testing voice authentication vendors at the time, and some of them accepted computer-generated voices as real. That gap stayed with him.
Founding Reality Defender in 2021
He co-founded Reality Defender in 2021. Its detection technology first took shape inside a nonprofit research effort before becoming a company, according to Reality Defender, and it went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. In 2024 the company was named Most Innovative at the RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox, and it now sells to banks, governments and other enterprises worried about impersonation.
