Former xAI Staffer Seeks $50 Million for Deepfake Defense Startup

Former xAI and Google staffer Tina Oberoi is in talks to raise $50 million in seed funding for a startup called Moir that is focused on combating deepfakes by enabling individuals to prove their identity online, Bloomberg reported Monday (Sept. 21), citing an unnamed source.

Oberoi has begun funding talks with investors at a $250 million valuation for Moir, according to the report.

A Moir spokesperson declined to comment, per the report.

Oberoi was with xAI for eight months, focusing on post-training, human data for multimodel Grok 3 and Grok 4, according to her LinkedIn profile. Before that, she was with Google for 5 years, first as software engineer and then as customer engineer, data an AI.

Oberoi’s profile on social platform X says “building something new.”

It was reported in June that research has found that with the rise of artificial intelligence deepfakes, most people could no longer distinguish real photos, videos or voice recordings from AI creations. The technology has left even experts doubting their abilities.

Cybersecurity company CybelAngel said in April, citing Keepnet Labs data, that deepfake-enabled vishing attacks surged 1,600% in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the fourth quarter of 2024 in the United States alone.

The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report logged more than 22,000 AI-related fraud complaints with losses exceeding $893 million.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Scale Amplification: How Revenue Amplifies Agent-Driven Identity“ found in April that 47% of firms with between $50 million and $250 million in annual revenue, and 58% of firms with over $1 billion in annual revenue detected AI-generated identity documents and deepfakes in the last year.

“At scale, the attack surface shifts from synthetic identity fraud toward deepfakes and automated scraping, revealing how the composition of agent attacks changes with scale,” the report said.

Another PYMNTS Intelligence report, “When Fraud Becomes the Customer: The Next Battlefront for Issuers,” found in September that because AI can now imitate normal human behavior, issuers need a different way to establish trust.

“The challenge for issuers is no longer simply detecting suspicious transactions,” the report said. “It is distinguishing genuine customers from convincing imposters without adding unnecessary friction for legitimate users.”

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI newsletter.