OpenAI secured $11 billion at an OpenAI funding valuation of $1.25 trillion, even as broader capital markets temper expectations for AI infrastructure.

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Modulate has secured $25 million in funding to expand its audio-native AI platform as enterprises confront deepfake voice fraud, impersonation, and unsafe automated conversations.

Future Ventures led the round, joined by Hyperplane and Lakestar, bringing the company’s funding total to $60 million.

The investment will accelerate AI research, engineering, developer tools, partnerships, and deployment options for organizations integrating voice intelligence into security and communications workflows.

The financing arrives as convincing synthetic speech makes telephone cues unreliable. Instead of examining only a transcript, Modulate’s technology analyzes how something is spoken, including emotion, tone, emphasis, intent, conversational behavior, and evidence of synthetic generation.

That distinction matters in vishing and executive-impersonation attacks, where the words may appear harmless while urgency, manipulation, or an artificial voice exposes the threat.

Modulate Raises $25M Fund

According to the announcement published by Modulate, the company’s offering centers on Velma, a real-time conversation-understanding platform designed to detect events such as fraud attempts, harassment, customer dissatisfaction, policy violations, and failures by voice AI agents.

Its underlying Ensemble Listening Model, or ELM, coordinates more than 100 specialized audio models rather than routing every task through one foundation model. Modulate says this design can deliver up to 1,000 times greater inference efficiency while reducing the computing, memory, and energy needed for audio analysis.

Deepfake detection is one of the platform’s most security-relevant capabilities. Modulate reported an average equal error rate of 1.104% across 14 Speech DF Arena datasets as of August 19, 2026, corresponding to 98.9% detection accuracy and first place on that benchmark snapshot. The 316-million-parameter model can begin returning streaming verdicts after 2.5 seconds of speech.

However, Modulate cautions that production systems rarely operate at the equal-error threshold; customers should tune thresholds using their own labeled recordings because stronger detection can produce more false alarms.

Modulate says its models now inspect more than 10 million hours of audio monthly and have processed over 600 million hours overall. The company also reached first place on Hugging Face’s Open ASR Leaderboard for transcription, ranking first among 88 evaluated models in July. Its batch transcription API starts at $0.03 per hour, while deepfake detection is listed at $0.25 per hour.

The capital will help Modulate extend APIs and software development kits, build industry-specific models, add partner integrations, and support deployment environments.

The company is targeting fraud prevention, healthcare security, contact-center oversight, gaming and social-platform moderation, child safety, and AI voice-agent supervision.

Real-time analysis could allow defenders to challenge suspicious callers, escalate risky sessions, or stop harmful conversations before damage occurs rather than reviewing recordings afterward.

For security teams, treat the technology as a detection layer rather than proof of identity. Benchmark leadership does not guarantee equivalent performance on compressed telephone audio, unfamiliar languages, background noise, replay attacks, or new voice generators.

Modulate notes that the arena does not measure streaming behavior or end-to-end narrowband telephony and primarily covers English and Mandarin.

Chief executive Carter Huffman said voice is becoming a primary AI interface, creating problems that transcripts cannot solve. With this round, Modulate is betting that audio understanding will become foundational infrastructure for authenticating callers, monitoring automated agents, and detecting manipulation.

As synthetic voices improve, combining audio AI with multifactor verification, transaction controls, and human review will remain essential to prevent a detection score from becoming a single point of failure.

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The European Union’s ability to detect and respond to EU cybersecurity incidents faces significant gaps, particularly in information-sharing and coordination between national and EU-level bodies, according to a new report by the European Court of Auditors (ECA). The auditors said the EU has made progress in developing a cybersecurity cooperation framework, but several measures needed to support an effective response to significant and large-scale incidents are still incomplete. Cybersecurity incidents can disrupt public services, businesses, critical infrastructure and the EU’s internal market. While member states remain primarily responsible for responding to such incidents, the EU has a role when attacks cause major disruption, significant financial losses or substantial harm, or when incidents affect several countries and exceed the response capacity of a single member state.

EU Cybersecurity Incidents Face Information-Sharing Gaps

The ECA identified insufficient information exchange as a major weakness in the EU’s cybersecurity response system. The Cyber Blueprint, adopted in 2025, largely clarifies roles and responsibilities for managing major cybersecurity crises. However, the cooperation between two key EU cyber networks has not yet been formally defined. The auditors said this affects cooperation between the CSIRTs network, which brings together national teams responsible for handling cyber incidents, and EU-CyCLONe, which supports cooperation during EU-level cyber crises. Information-sharing is also affected by differences in national security laws and the ongoing implementation of updated EU cybersecurity rules, including the NIS 2 Directive. According to the auditors, these factors can make it harder for EU networks to identify threats early and coordinate an effective response. “The EU has made progress in building a cybersecurity cooperation framework, but it is not yet working as effectively as it should,” said George-Marius Hyzler, the ECA Member responsible for the audit. “When a serious cyber incident occurs, timely and actionable information is essential. Without it, networks and mechanisms lose much of their added value.”

European Cybersecurity Alert System Still Delayed

The audit also found that the European Cybersecurity Alert System was not operational at the time of the assessment. Two hubs examined by the auditors, ATHENA and ENSOC, had not started operating because of procurement delays. The system also lacked several elements needed for operation, including cooperation agreements, a common classification system and technical standards. The findings come as the EU continues to invest in cybersecurity. Under the 2021-2027 EU budget, €1.4 billion has been allocated to cybersecurity through the Digital Europe Programme, the EU’s main source of cybersecurity funding.

Overlap Among EU Cybersecurity Bodies

The ECA also identified overlapping responsibilities among some EU bodies involved in monitoring cybersecurity threats. The European Commission’s cyber situation centre, established in 2022 and largely supported by external providers, carries out work that the auditors said partly duplicates existing capabilities at the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA). These capabilities include monitoring threats and developing cybersecurity situational awareness. The auditors called for better coordination to reduce duplication and strengthen the overall effectiveness of the EU’s cybersecurity framework.

Funding Checks Raise Security Concerns

The report also highlighted weaknesses in checks on some organisations receiving EU cybersecurity funding. These checks are intended to reduce risks linked to intrusion or influence by non-EU states and prevent sensitive security information from being shared with non-EU authorities. However, while grant beneficiaries are responsible for assessing the ownership and control of third parties receiving financial support, the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre does not verify those assessments. The ECA warned that this could expose sensitive infrastructure, operational data and security-critical technologies to security risks. The audit covered the period from 2022 to 2025 and assessed whether EU actions effectively supported the detection of and response to significant and large-scale cybersecurity incidents. Audit missions were conducted in Ireland, Greece and Italy.

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San Francisco, United States, 15th July 2026, CyberNewswire