Clarity

From social media policing to deepfake detection

Michael Matias, a Stanford computer science graduate and former officer in Unit 8200, founded Clarity in late 2022 together with Natalie Fridman and Gil Avriel. The core idea grew out of a problem that was getting worse as AI video and audio generation tools improved: the easier it is to produce convincing fake content, the harder it is for organizations and governments to know whether a given piece of footage is real. The company's solution combines several layers of analysis (forensics of the file itself, a metadata check, and detection of algorithmic patterns typical of machine-generated content) to give a given media file a credibility score.

Verifying footage from 7 October

One of the best documented and most prominent uses of Clarity's technology was not commercial at all. According to reports, the company worked with Israeli government bodies and with the Israeli software company Kaltura to verify video footage from the events of 7 October 2023, including testimonies of released hostages. When every side in a conflict can accuse the other of forgery, a tool that can give an independent technical opinion on a file's authenticity becomes relevant far beyond the consumer market or the tech industry. It is also a use that is hard to measure with ordinary business metrics such as revenue or number of customers.

$16 million and an unusual list of investors

In 2024, Clarity raised $16 million in a seed round led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. What stood out in the investor list was not only the leading funds, but the presence of more than 70 private investors, among them Udi Mokady, chairman of the security company CyberArk, and Professor Larry Diamond of Stanford University, a senior scholar of democracy and human rights. Such a mix, of cybersecurity people alongside an academic who studies the social effects of disinformation, suggests the company's dual nature: both a commercial security product and a tool that bears directly on questions of public trust.

Deel's 15th acquisition

On 3 August 2026, Deel, a global payroll and hiring platform that at the time announced annual recurring revenue (ARR) of more than $1.5 billion, acquired Clarity, in a deal that is the 15th of its acquisitions. Deel explained the move by pointing to a growing problem: candidates who use deepfakes to impersonate someone in remote job interviews, sometimes in order to steal company data after being hired. Deel cited an estimate by the research firm Gartner that by 2028 about a quarter of all candidate profiles online will be fake. According to a Calcalist report, the deal was valued at between $40 and $50 million in cash and stock; the exact amount was not officially published.

A change in the team along the way

One point worth stating precisely, because it changes over time: according to 2026 reports, Ziv Isaiah, a serial entrepreneur who had previously built fraud detection technology at nSure.ai, joined Clarity in 2025 as its new chief technology officer, at a time when part of the original founding team left the company as it shifted its focus toward enterprise security. This matters because Deel's official acquisition announcement presents Isaiah as a "co-founder," while press reports from the company's founding in 2022 identify the three original founders as Michael Matias, Natalie Fridman and Gil Avriel. The list of founders in this entry includes the three original founders and also Isaiah, whom the acquisition announcement presents as a co-founder; this should not be taken to mean he was part of the founding in 2022.