Anyone with a working phone knows the number of scam-based calls is forever increasing, but Pindrop Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Vijay Balasubramaniyan knows better than most.
Long obsessed with solving difficult problems, Balasubramaniyan was a computer fiend at age 10 after his family moved from a small town in Northern India to the tech hub of Bangalore. His family couldn’t afford a computer, so he spent all his time at the lab, and it was in this environment that he realized the full potential of those all-powerful machines. “For me,” he said in an interview, “the programming or getting the computer to do all these crazy kinds of things became the most interesting part.”
With that programming, of course, comes good and bad. When Balasubramaniyan was studying for his PhD, a bank called him about a disputed transaction, starting by asking for his Social Security number. “Bear in mind,” he said, “I’m in India, and my bank is here in the U.S. They were calling me at 3:00 in the morning asking me for my social security number. All kinds of warning signals are going off.”
Thirty minutes later, Balasubramaniyan canceled the transaction just to be sure, but the experience stuck with him. “I was like, ‘This is crazy,’” he said. “On the flight back home, I was super frustrated because I was like, ‘We have voice [technology] that has existed for over 100 years, and we can’t identify who’s on the other end? That feels like a huge gap.’ So when I came back, I started talking to my Ph.D. advisor, and we started working on this concept of how do you identify where a call is coming from, who’s behind that call, and how do you give guarantees that it’s the right person making the right call?”
It was this moment that Balasubramaniyan, who has also worked at Siemens, IBM, and Google, found his niche. After that happened, the very banks that were being scammed called him for help. With only a few months under his belt, he set about solving the problem. “One of the calls that I got was from a top-four bank in the U.S.,” he remembered. “They came and asked me to come to their data centers, to come run our algorithms to go solve the problem. We had a month to go find fraud at this data center.”
Spoiler alert: He found it. Now, with 240 employees bolstering his company, his mission is to find it anew, and it’s a challenge he’s up to. “Let’s make sure we give the customers the right expectations,” he said, “and then make sure that we’re providing software that can scale and provide the right kind of service.”
