Phishing scams in the Web3 industry are rampant, and even "crypto veterans" may fall into the trap. On January 2nd, Bill Lou, CEO and co-founder of Nest Wallet, suffered a phishing attack while attempting to claim what he believed to be a genuine LFG airdrop, resulting in a loss of 52 stETH (approximately $125,000). Lou stated that he clicked on a link in an article at the top of a Google search, which led to a fraudulent website. "I saw an airdrop guide article and clicked on a link to sign a message, without even questioning it," he said.

Related reading: "Vitalik's account "hacked" and released phishing information, which fund fraud methods should users be wary of?"

With the further development of the Web3 ecosystem, security issues have become increasingly important. In addition to considering "technical" attacks such as protocol code vulnerabilities and domain hijacking, each project also needs to consider potential risks from social media platforms. Account theft or phishing links posted by fake accounts can damage a project's brand image, even if they are unrelated to the project's security. In this niche field, AI-driven brand protection platform Doppel has attracted capital attention. On January 24th, Doppel received a $14 million investment led by a16z.

Doppel Introduction

Doppel, born in 2022, aims to provide solutions for project parties to deal with large-scale digital risks. In two years, Doppel has accumulated well-known clients in the Web3 field, such as Coinbase, OpenSea, and Magic Eden. Through its powerful artificial intelligence model, Doppel can scan millions of websites, social media accounts, mobile applications, and paid advertisements, and classify and detect threats related to brand infringement and phishing scams, automatically removing them.

The operation mode of Doppel seems very simple, which is to cooperate with platforms and provide them with AI-based threat detection and removal services. Firstly, it integrates with as many platforms as possible, including social media platforms and domain registrars, to achieve true end-to-end automation of data sources and alert remediation. Based on this, Doppel establishes strategic relationships with platforms to better collaborate and share information, and take more proactive measures when facing potential threats.

According to the introduction, the social media channels covered by Doppel include Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Telegram, Discord, and Reddit. In addition, Doppel can also track Apple, Google, Chrome, Firefox, and many APK websites to deal with malicious imitation applications.

With the emergence of WormGPT and deepfake tools, targeted fraudulent activities have appeared on a large scale. Doppel has deployed zero-shot learning computer vision language models to automate the security analyst workflow, achieving better performance in signal-to-noise ratio results and parsing speed.

Dopple divides its business into five directions on its official website: anti-phishing, VIP protection, identification of network threats and anti-piracy, and anti-infringement. Institutions or individual users can book service demonstrations according to their own needs.

Development and Financing

a16z Invests in Another Security Company

On January 24th, Doppel announced the completion of a $14 million Series A funding round, led by a16z, with participation from Strategic Cyber Ventures, Frederic Kerrest (Vice Chairman and Co-founder of Okta), Emilio Escobar (Chief Information Security Officer of Datadog), Andy Ozment (Chief Technology Risk Officer and Executive Vice President of Capital One), Ryan Carlson (President of Chainguard), Ryan Noon (Co-founder and Chairman of Material Security), Ramsey Homsany (Co-founder of Octant), Prafulla Dhariwal (Research Scientist at OpenAI), and existing investors South Park Commons, SVAngel, Gokul Rajaram, and Sabrina Hahn.

Before Doppel, a16z invested in Web3 security company Stelo in March 2023. Stelo primarily targets users and developers, and its browser extension can explain every transaction and signature to users during the transaction process, serving as a "firewall" for wallets.

Stelo was initially positioned as a wallet for independent wallets, but as various Web3 applications began to introduce embedded wallets, Stelo's value gradually weakened. Additionally, it faced competition from premium products such as Wallet Guard and Pocket Universe that were vying for market share. After 7 months of fundraising, Stelo announced the closure of its services.

Related reading: "How to use the Stelo wallet security plugin invested by a16z and OpenSea in daily interactions?"

Doppel is different from these anti-phishing solutions in that its business is aimed at the B-side. Compared to using complex technology to monitor wallet transactions and working hard on the last line of defense to protect user assets, Doppel's business value is more focused on protecting project parties from being affected by phishing scams and protecting brand reputation by setting up defenses at the first stop of risk.

a16z mentioned in explaining its investment in Doppel that as the company grows, the problem of fake accounts has become more frequent, from a rare occurrence to an hourly issue. a16z's internal security team spent several months searching for a solution to deal with the impact of new fake accounts created every day.

After collaborating with Doppel, a16z's security team found that Doppel is typically three times faster in detecting and eliminating threats in popular social networks, and provides platform coverage that many large existing enterprises cannot provide. In just two weeks of concept verification, Doppel completed about half of the annual workload of a16z's existing solutions.

客户也成 Doppel 投资方

Customers also become Doppel investors

Doppel was created by two former Uber software engineers, Kevin Tian and Rahul Madduluri, who were involved in building Uber's AI/ML system. Initially positioned as an NFT fraud detection company, Doppel completed a $5 million seed round led by FTX in May 2022.

In 2022, Doppel established partnerships with well-known institutions in the NFT field such as Dapper Labs, Yuga Labs, and Magic Eden. Together, they built a real-time cross-chain monitoring platform that indexed nearly 100 million NFTs on Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon. The platform detected 37 million potential counterfeit NFTs.

NFT marketplace MakersPlace has been controversial due to the sale of pirated works on its platform, and the effectiveness of its collaboration with artists has been limited. Doppel provides MakersPlace with art monitoring services, and its NFT index and next-generation computer vision models can detect copyright infringement on the blockchain in minutes. In addition, it can distinguish between blatant plagiarism scams and well-intentioned fan derivatives, maintaining the presence of artists in the community.

Magic Eden has also been troubled by fake accounts. In addition to imitating the official Magic Eden account, there are many NFT brands that claim to support Magic Eden in their profiles but do not actually trade on the platform. Doppel has a partnership with Magic Eden and their AI platform uses a combination of image and logo detection models to identify and solve cases that other providers may have missed. Additionally, Doppel's NFT indexer can monitor for airdrop scams and notify trading platforms of any detected results.

Source: Doppel

This year, Doppel raised a $5 million seed fund with luxurious investors including FTX Ventures as the lead investor, as well as Spartan Group, Solana Ventures, Polygon Labs, OpenSea Ventures, and SV Angel. Star investors Balaji Srinivasan and Zhuoxun Yin, co-founder of Magic Eden, also participated.

SV Angel has been relatively inactive in the past year, resulting in low attention. However, it has participated in the Series A financing of Coinbase, Helium, and Uniswap in the past few years. In addition, Zane Lackey, former co-founder of Signal Sciences and Chief Information Security Officer of Etsy, will soon join Doppel's board of directors.

Organizations and well-known figures are at risk of being used as bait for phishing scams. After the launch of Blast, fraudsters once impersonated Paradigm founder Matt Huang and made tens of thousands of dollars through phishing links. Official emails from projects such as Cointelegraph, WalletConnect, and Token Terminal have also been used for phishing scams after being hacked. With the growing activity in the Web3 ecosystem, there is still potential market space for Doppel's focus.

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