- The first startup from University of Michigan’s Flint campus is focusing on finding AI ‘deepfakes’
- The company will target US courts as customers, but finance and public safety also could benefit from the technology, its founder says
- ProbeTruth will open an office in January and hopes to have 50 workers by the end of 2026
A Michigan startup is working to answer a growing question for courtrooms, banks and other businesses across the U.S. as artificial intelligence challenges reality: How can an institution know that voices, videos and photos are not shams?
Answers will be coming from the cybersecurity labs at the University of Michigan, where new business ProbeTruth evolved from research to the first commercialized patent from the Flint campus.
“The trust in society will go away if we don’t have the tools available that can authenticate … multimedia,” said company founder Khalid Malik, professor of computer science and director of cybersecurity at UM-Flint’s College of Innovation and Technology.
ProbeTruth and its “spellbreaker” product are offshoots of Malik’s cybersecurity specialty: Authenticating audio, videos and images.
Malik started the path to commercialization when he received a National Science Foundation grant in 2018, and his research progressed as he arrived at the Flint campus about two years ago.
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With pre-seed funding concluding last fall — including an assist from Ann Arbor SPARK, which has so far invested $1.5 million — the company is poised to take off.
The company’s first hires will dig deeper into how to use a so-called neurosymbolic, multimodal AI platform to detect deepfake media. The program is a hybrid of different AI applications, allowing both pattern recognition and logical reasoning.
The technology is needed because “misinformation campaigns have become more sophisticated, faster-spreading, and harder to debunk,” according to the company.
Already, AI-related cyberattacks have prompted global chaos and theft of identities and money. Fraudsters also are using voice cloning and face swapping to bypass security checks, the company says.
Soon, Malik says, institutions will face even sharper and potentially more damaging fakes through digitally altered voices and images.
The impact could be felt, he said, when a bank gets what it thinks is verbal authorization to transfer money.
One potential customer is US courts, he added, where average people may be tempted to create inexpensive fake evidence.
Malik gave an example of a child custody case in which a video purports to show a parent mistreating a child.
Judges, jurors and investigators “will just believe in it, because that photograph is going to seem very real,” Malik said.
Other likely customers could be financial institutions and the insurance industry, Malik said.
But the market could seem endless, as fraud options multiply amid AI improvements that make faking information even easier.
As an example, Malik said, the Japanese government is wondering how ProbeTruth could help verify disaster reports after fake tsunami videos circulated following a summer earthquake.
“Imagine that they are getting 100 calls (for help) at the same time, and 99 of them are fake?” Malik said. “So who should they send help to?”
ProbeTruth is opening a development office next to UM-Flint in January, while its corporate functions will be housed in Ann Arbor. It’s among 31 startups launched through U-M’s technology transfer office in 2025.
By mid-2026, Malik said the company will seek $3 million in another investment funding round. And by the end of 2026, he added, ProbeTruth could employ 50. “That’s huge, but we’re very hopeful,” he said.
Malik also said he wants the company to remain in Michigan, despite the concentration of higher-dollar tech investors in California and other locations.
The growth arc would be exciting for UM-Flint and the community, said Chris Pearson, dean of the College of Innovation and Technology.
The college was added to the Flint campus in 2021 and now has about 1,000 students. Its dedicated learning complex will open in February, and a $40 million second phase approved by U-M regents is expected to open in 2028.
U-M also is investing in an innovation campus in Detroit.
Programs in Flint focus on emerging technologies, Pearson said, like Malik’s research into cybersecurity and AI.
Both Malik and Pearson said they expect ProbeTruth will help to diversify Michigan’s economy and to grow tech jobs in Flint.
“We really want our research to impact the community,” Pearson said.
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