Good People, April 4

GOOD PEOPLE QUOTE

🤝 Good Morning and welcome back to Good People, a weekly newsletter for 25,000+ elite engineering and product talent looking to dodge a few tariffs.

👋 Sorry who is this? Good Question! We’re Coastal Recruiting, experts in placing technical talent at early-stage, VC backed startups. If you think high-impact, high-paying startup roles are for you, book a consultation with one of our amazing recruiters.

📅 This week in the newsletter:

 👷 Part one of our 2nd startup deep dive: Outtake.ai (Hint, they’re hiring)

 🔥 Fresh batch of Hot Startups Hiring

⚾️ QUICK HITTERS:

• No-Code MCP: Our friends over at Gumloop.com released their guMCP, open-source MCP servers for every app, hosted for free.

• Agents but make them swarm: The ai agent space is buzzing after 2 new releases that utilize swarms to accomplish tasks hit the market this week. Convergence announced parallel agents, while Lindy let loose their Agent Swarm.

👇 Alright on to the good stuff 👇

Outtake.AI: AI vs AI in the Battle for Digital Identity

The Problem Space

The rise of generative AI has led to a surge in sophisticated cyber threats like digital impersonation, deepfake content, and advanced phishing attacks. Malicious actors can now easily create convincing fake personas or media that exploit brands and individuals, eroding trust online. For example, millions of phishing emails and social engineering attacks occur daily​.

Even OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman warned that AI will achieve “superhuman persuasion” abilities before general intelligence, leading to potentially strange and dangerous outcomes.

Companies and public figures face identity theft, fake domains, fraudulent social media profiles, and counterfeit content that can damage reputation and compromise security.

Their Solution

Outtake.ai addresses this problem with an AI-driven content intelligence and cyber defense platform specialized in protecting digital identity and brand integrity. Their solution deploys “agentic AI” – essentially autonomous AI agents – to search, classify, and neutralize threats in real time​

The platform continuously monitors a wide range of surfaces: social media sites, domain registrations, emails, app stores, advertisement networks, and more​. It offers several modules targeting different attack vectors:

• Digital Identity Protection: Scans the web for unauthorized use of a company’s or person’s name, likeness, or content and dismantles scams and impersonations exploiting the community​.

• Multi-Surface Anti-Phishing: Detects phishing campaigns across domains, email, SMS, and other channels, countering attempts to erode an enterprise’s reputation​.

• Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT): Trains custom AI agents to track a client’s keywords (name, image, likeness, context) across open internet sources​, helping identify emerging threats or unauthorized mentions.

The timing of Outtake's emergence couldn't be more critical. As generative AI tools become increasingly accessible and sophisticated, the internet faces an unprecedented wave of synthetic content. From fake customer service accounts defrauding consumers to deepfake videos of public figures endorsing scams, the threat landscape is expanding exponentially.

While traditional brand protection services have existed for years, they typically rely heavily on human analysts and manual processes that can't scale to match the volume and sophistication of AI-generated threats. Outtake's bet is that only AI can effectively counter AI – fighting algorithmic fire with algorithmic fire.

The Founder

Outtake.ai was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in New York City​. The founding team blends expertise in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and enterprise software. Their leadership team, headed by Alex Dhillon, consists of ex-Palantir heavy hitters.

• Alex Arjun Dhillon (Founder & CEO): Alex Dhillon launched Outtake in mid-2023 after a stint leading AI products at Palantir Technologies​.

The Technical Challenge

The technical challenge Outtake has taken on is formidable. Their system must monitor social media, domain registrations, app stores, advertisements, and more – continuously searching for unauthorized uses of a client's identity or brand. When potential threats are identified, Outtake's AI must accurately classify them (distinguishing genuine mentions from impersonations) and then automatically initiate takedown procedures through the appropriate channels.

This requires sophisticated AI capable of understanding visual, textual, and contextual elements across multiple platforms – determining, for instance, if a social media account using a celebrity's name and image is an official account, a fan page, satire, or a malicious impersonation attempting to scam followers.

"80% of internet traffic is now image or video content," notes Dhillon. "We've built the models, infrastructure, and workflows to make sense of this tidal wave of information." The company's technology can not only identify basic impersonation but also detect deepfakes and AI-generated content designed to mimic a protected identity.

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