Pitch Deck: AI Startup Dig Raises $14M to Help Brands Fight Disinfo

An influencer disinformation campaign can be disastrous for a brand — and companies want to stop them before they go viral.

When Dig was founded in 2021 in Tel Aviv, Israel, the startup initially helped marketing teams compress and repurpose their video content into short-form clips to post on social media.

Last year, amid escalating geopolitical conflicts, the team became interested in how disinformation campaigns were being generated and who was spreading them online.

“We all live in an era where we feel we can’t trust what we hear, and it’s very painful,” Dig CEO Ofer Familier said in an interview with Business Insider.

Dig realized it was time to pivot.

“We learned how these narratives are being built,” and the difference between how they are created and disseminated on social and video platforms versus traditional websites, Familier said.

For years, marketers have employed social listening technology to help them understand what is being said about their brands in text formats on blogs and forums. But social listening on video on apps like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram is a more complicated and expensive process. That’s because it requires natural language processing and other computing costs involved with processing video, Familier said.

Dig built a tech stack that uses its own large language models to identify posts across video, image, and text related to a particular brand. Dig analyzes the content to flag any potential reputational or brand risks, such as deepfakes, disinformation, or content creators selling counterfeit products. It also accounts for humor and sarcasm to rule out false positives, the company said.

Clients can use a Dig chatbot to ask questions about the insights it has uncovered, like how a brand compares to how its competitors are showing up on social media.

Dig now has around 70 clients, the company said. It generates revenue by charging a monthly subscription fee and pricing its packages based on usage.

Dig said its edge over other social listening tools is the speed at which it can provide analysis. Using its in-house tech also lowers the cost compared to using other commercially available models and services, the company said.

Earlier this month, Dig announced it had raised a $14 million Series A investment round, co-led by the venture capital firms New Era Capital Partners and Osage Venture Partners. This brings the company’s total funding to $22 million.

Familier said Dig intends to use the fresh funds to invest in sales and marketing, including growing those teams. Dig has about 50 employees across its Tel Aviv, New York, and London offices.

Check out the pitch deck Dig used to secure its $14 million Series A investment. Some of the slides have been omitted or redacted.