According to Federal Trade Commission data, consumers reported losing more than $10 billion to fraud in 2023. Contact Center Fraud has recently skyrocketed with one in every 730 calls to a contact center expected to be fraudulent by the end of this year.
Founded in 2011 by Paul Judge, Pindrop is preventing fraud in voice channels like AI-powered call centers with its software and technology. The company has analyzed over 5.3 billion calls, prevented $2 billion in fraud losses and identified 104 million spoof calls.
Judge’s interest in technology blossomed quite early. He recalls playing around with computers when he was in elementary and middle school. His mother who worked as teacher taught him how to type and he would play the typing skills games she used. Judge would later become interested in programming, taking part in competitions while in high school.
It was at a summer program NASA scholarship that Judge became the overachiever he is today. He had relied on his natural abilities to get him through school without doing homework or studying. However, seeing his peers work hard at their studies and the rigorous program encouraged him to increase his pace.
E-commerce was taking off when Judge went to study a bachelor’s in computer science at Morehouse College in 1998. He was intrigued with the concept of protecting the movement of money across the wires and decided to pursue it further.
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He earned a Ph.D. and masters in network security from Georgia Tech. After grad school, Judge joined the founding team of CipherTrust. He rose to CTO of the email security firm and stayed until it was acquired by Secure Computing in 2006 for $273 million.
He then co-founded Purewire, a security-as-a-service web platform, with his former colleagues. Within 18 months, the company had grown to 40 employees and was acquired by Barracuda Networks. Judge took the role of chief research officer at Barracuda which went public in 2013 with a $1 billion market cap.
The idea for his next startup came from a group of professors at Georgia Tech. They had written a research paper on phone call fraud and were approached by a bank looking to buy an associated product.
The professors, in turn asked Judge for advise and he ended up investing and taking an operational role with the company. Pindrop, the creator of voice authentication technology used by companies to detect fraudsters and authenticate customers in a secure way at scale was born.
“There was no product, no company. The professors asked me to meet them. I said I’d advise them because I liked them, but that led to me offering up investment money, which led to me agreeing to do it with them, in an operational role,” Judge explained how Pindrop was founded.
Pindrop provides a variety of solutions. Its most popular application secures contact centers by analyzing customers’ voices and comparing them with a comprehensive risk database to verify that callers are who they claim to be.
The company has responded to the deepfake challenge with the launch of Pindrop Pulse, a new tool that analyses audio to identify fake videos through voice recognition. Notably, Pindrop’s technology was crucial in identifying the TTS engine used in the recent President Biden robocall attack.
Today, Pindrop is number 12 on the list of the largest financial institutions in the US & UK. The company provides its voice authentication and security services to 11 of the largest insurers in the US and eight of the top 10 banks and credit unions.
Judge is the Executive Chairman of Pindrop which has received over $200 million of venture capital funding. He has invested in over 60 technology startups, and 30 patented and patent-pending computer security technologies.
Judge is also currently the co-founder and partner of TechSquare Labs, a startup studio and venture fund based in Atlanta. His economic development work has helped create over 1,000 jobs.
