Kevin Tian's Doppel Pits Good AI Agents Against Bad AI Bots
By Tom Kagy | 06 May, 2025

Doppel deploys armies of good bots to protect netizens from bad bots that phish and plant ransomeware.

If you think social engineering is some beneficent government program devised by social scientists to increase general societal happiness, you are probably among the biggest beneficiaries of what Doppel does.  

Social engineering is actually today's biggest threat to personal and business financial security.  It's the oddly misleading term used to describe efforts by hackers based in North Korea, Russia and other lawless jurisdictions to gather enough personal data about unsuspecting, careless people to enable taking control of their devices.  

Typically that's just the first step toward the big prize of gaining access to the computer systems and bank accounts of governments and businesses big and small.  The ultimate prize is a hefty ransom that can run into millions of dollars or a treasure trove of personal data of tens of millions of users to be sold on the dark web to retail baddies looking to drain your personal bank accounts.

These social engineering efforts typically begin with emails that sound like they're from colleagues and contain a link that invites clicking, often subtly, without direct mention.  The click will send your device to a spyware server that will load a Trojan horse that either allows the bad guys to take control of your device for ransom or provide secret access to everything you type or do online.

This is precisely the evil Kevin Tian sought to address on behalf of corporate clients when he co-founded Doppel in 2022 with CTO Rahul Madduluri.  They began by hiring a bands of humans in low-cost countries like India and the Philippines to ferret out malware sites and sources of phishing emails.  But they found that humans weren't cost efficient enough to counter the hundreds of millions of attacks taking place each day.

“If threat actors can use AI to spin up these attacks for just a few cents on the dollar, we’ve got to make sure that we can also handle that volume on our side,” Tian told Forbes.

Tian decided that the only solution was to create Doppel AI agents to play CIA against the bad bots.  Doppel's bots autonomously scour the internet, the dark web and social media for bad actors.  They even ferret out copycat sites that exploit poor spellers, fake user accounts, and malicious ads. 

The 100 million daily alerts screened by Doppel’s good AI bots sort the risky from the harmless with about 90% accuracy.  Of course that results in far too many innocent websites and ads being misflagged, to their damage.  Doppel continues trying to improve its batting average.

But its success was deemed good enough that in early May it attracted $35 million in new funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.  Doppel's total $55.5 million in venture funding to date implies a valuation of $205 million. 

Tian met co-founder Madduluri while both were working on Uber Elevate, a project looking ahead to the day when taxies will fly.  Doppel's initial target was helping crypto platforms track NFT fraud.  They expanded their efforts  in 2023 to the current broader scope of internet bad actors.