MADISON, Wis (WMDX) — Samarth Shah and Tanisq Jawahar are heading into their junior year at UW-Madison. They founded redelevenlabs, a service that uses artificial intelligence to combat digital disinformation.

The company’s goal is to identify and combat deepfakes: highly convincing photos and recordings that depict things that aren’t real or situations that didn’t happen.

Their brand new company, which they say has already received a seven-figure acquisition offer, is addressing an area of AI that is largely untapped.

“There’s a lot of money on the side of AI in creating things and developing things in general, but nothing is really there in the security side as such,” Shah said. “Nobody’s out there to protect yourself or anything that is being generated. And that’s what we see a gap in this market for… Nobody is there to say ‘hey this is illegal, hey this is defamatory in some capacity.’ So that’s what we’re doing.”

Redelevenlabs helps prove that those deepfakes online aren’t real, then helps their clients get that fake content taken offline. When their AI detects content that is a fake image of their clients, they create an evidence bundle showing the proof that something isn’t real, then submit it to social media platforms for removal. The proof comes from visual clues and sometimes metadata.

The team says that their service is a cheaper and more efficient way to get fake content taken down than doing it through lawyers. Right now, however, they are focusing on clients with a high net worth, and they hope their service can be more accessible down the road.

The unauthorized content they take down is often used in cyberbullying or sextortion cases. Redelevenlabs is fighting against online trolls.

“Actually in one of our competitions last month in Chicago, when we were pitching this a person came up to us and told us ‘you know I’d love to have seen this five years ago because I just had a friend in high school who took his own life because some troll releasing such pictures of him on the web,’” Jawahar said.

They are just starting their alpha testing, which has over 50 people signed up. The test will be their first time with real clients combing the web and working to take down deepfake videos and images.

Shah and Jawahar are competing in an event hosted by the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday, August 19. It is a competition like Shark Tank that features local entrepreneurs. If redelevenlabs wins, they’ll earn a trip to San Francisco, where they’ll have an opportunity to pitch their idea to more investors.

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