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.
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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Ask CISOs why they think there is a cyber skills shortage in their organization, what keeps them up at night or what the most important issue facing the industry is — at some point, even if not the first response, they will bring up budgets.
For example, at RSA Conference 2024, a roundtable discussion about issues facing the cybersecurity industry, one CISO stated bluntly that budgets — or lack thereof — are the biggest problem. At a time when everything is getting more expensive, the CISO said, security budgets are being slashed.
As for the cybersecurity talent shortage, the 2024 ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study noted that “39% said a lack of budget was the top reason for cyber shortages, replacing a shortage of talent as the previous top reason for staff shortages.” According to Forrester’s 2024 Cybersecurity Benchmarks Global Report, the cybersecurity budget is just 5.7% of the entire IT budget, making it very difficult for CISOs to bring in the right personnel or upgrade tools and solutions.
However, it might not be the dollar amount that is the problem as much as where the budget is coming from. CEOs think about cybersecurity differently when it is tied to IT and when the CISO reports directly to the CIO versus when the CISO can present cybersecurity as a vital cog in overall business operations and tie it directly to business risk, the Forrester report found.
“CISOs who can articulate the business value of cybersecurity, demonstrating how it can drive revenue and support strategic goals, are more likely to secure the necessary funding. This shift also reflects a growing recognition of cybersecurity’s strategic importance beyond mere IT operations,” Louis Columbus wrote.
Once cybersecurity is approached as a key factor in business operations rather than as a function of IT, CEOs and CISOs are more likely to be on the same page when it comes to budget.
“Security funding and oversight is a top priority for both the management team and the Board of Directors,” said Dave Gerry, CEO of Bugcrowd.
“Cybersecurity investment uplift is prioritized against the cyber threats we face as a business; the IT risks that we have identified and need to remediate or the customer and compliance obligations that we need to ensure,” Gerry added. “Thematically, however, it all points back to ensuring that the confidentiality, integrity and availability of our data we reside over is protected — whether it’s that of customers, employees or critical business partners, whilst enabling our business in-turn.”
Risk prioritization and business continuity are two key areas that George Jones, CISO at Critical Start, focuses on. Along with emerging threats and vulnerability management, Jones says these four items are the pillars of security for the enterprise as they are aligned with overall business goals and objectives.
One of the drivers behind realigning cybersecurity investments is the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) new rules around the disclosure of cybersecurity incidents. Organizations are now also required to share details about their cybersecurity risk management programs, particularly around any financial information.
“After recent SEC guidelines were announced, Boards are more focused than ever on cyber risk reduction and ensuring adequate funding is critical, especially as organization’s attack surfaces continue to rapidly expand,” said Gerry.
Explore AI cybersecurity solutionsWhile CISOs and CEOs (and, in many cases, in conjunction with the CFO) have to build an ongoing dialogue about cybersecurity investments, they are coming to the table with two different interests.
“The CEO lens will be focused on obtaining satisfaction that the security initiatives deliver value with tolerable impacts on productivity, but more importantly looking for the potential of competitive advantage,” said Gareth Lindahl-Wise, CISO at Ontinue. The CISO’s approach, on the other hand, focuses on risk prevention, mitigation and solutions to meet all of the organization’s legal, regulatory and contractual obligations.
The overall goal should be to create a security posture advantageous in gaining or retaining customers or attracting investment. Ultimately, said Lindahl-Wise, these decisions lie with the CEO and board.
“When it comes to funding and risk acceptance, CISO is, largely, an expert advisor — if an informed and conscious decision has been made by a CEO, then one should argue the CISO has discharged their responsibilities,” Lindahl-Wise added.
CEO Gerry, however, said the final decision on funding allocation is made by the Board of Directors, and it is up to both the CEO and the CISO to get their buy-in on where and what security investments should be made.
“This is a key reason that the CISO should report to the CEO and have direct access to the Board of Directors,” said Gerry. “While oftentimes security can be viewed as a cost center, the new reality is that a robust security program should be a competitive differentiator and a revenue enabler, in addition to simply being the cost of doing business in an ever-expanding threat environment.”
CISOs have long understood the role AI plays in cybersecurity, particularly handling some of the most mundane tasks that free up time for overworked security teams to handle issues that require hands-on management. As generative AI becomes ubiquitous in the workplace, CEOs have become increasingly aware of AI’s impact on business and security risks. Some companies are turning to adding Chief AI Officers to their IT and security teams, but even when they aren’t CEOs still recognize the need to include AI in future security budgets.
“As threats become more sophisticated, leveraging AI tools enables us to enhance our threat detection, automate responses and improve incident management,” said Darren Guccione, CEO at Keeper Security. “Skilled professionals are needed to navigate the rapidly evolving threat landscape and ensure that our AI-driven strategies remain effective and secure and must be a budget consideration.”
How it is defined within the cybersecurity budget will depend on how it is used. Will it be a fringe use of AI in commercial tools for productivity gains or an embedded use of AI in the organization’s core offerings?
“If it is the latter, the CEO must satisfy themselves that the organization has the right experience to manage the opportunities and risks,” Lindahl-Wise said. As for the security side of things, “My hunch is we will see AI responsibilities feature heavily in CIO/CTO roles before standalone CAIOs become the norm.”
AI might be the most current technology and security disrupter, but it won’t be the last. Where it is similar is that it creates risk, both to the business and to cybersecurity, and risk is where CEOs and CISOs will focus on investments as a team.
The post CISO vs. CEO: Making a case for cybersecurity investments appeared first on Security Intelligence.
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