Artificial Intelligence has made content creation easier than ever. Tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, Midjourney, and OpenAI’s video generation models can now create realistic text, images, audio, and even videos within minutes.
With the latest AI models like Google Gemini Omni becoming more powerful every month, creating content that looks and sounds real no longer requires technical skills or expensive software.
While this technology brings new opportunities, it also creates a growing challenge. Governments, journalists, businesses, and security agencies around the world are finding it harder to verify whether a piece of digital content is real or AI-generated. A fake image, cloned voice, or manipulated video can spread across social media within hours and influence public opinion before the truth comes out.
Deepfakes have become one of the biggest misinformation threats worldwide. Although cybersecurity experts and digital forensic specialists can often identify signs of manipulation, most people do not have the technical knowledge to tell the difference between real and fake content.
This is the problem that inspired Deepy, a UAE-based startup focused on deepfake detection and digital content verification. Founded by cybersecurity researcher Bashayer Alsalami, Deepy started as a Master’s research project at Zayed University and has since evolved into a platform designed to help organizations and individuals verify the authenticity of digital content before misinformation spreads.
What Is Deepy?
Deepy is a UAE-based cybersecurity startup that helps detect AI-generated and manipulated digital content. Built from Bashayer Alsalami’s Master’s research in Cybersecurity at Zayed University, the platform analyzes images, videos, and audio files using AI and digital forensic techniques to identify signs of manipulation that are often invisible to the human eye.
What makes Deepy different is its focus on real-world verification. The platform has been trained on thousands of authentic and AI-generated media samples to detect inconsistencies in facial movements, voice patterns, metadata, compression artifacts, and other digital fingerprints left behind by AI tools.
As deepfake technology becomes more advanced and accessible, Deepy is working to provide governments, media organizations, security teams, and businesses with a practical way to verify content authenticity before it spreads across the internet.
Meet the Founder
The person behind Deepy is Bashayer Alsalami, an Emirati cybersecurity specialist and researcher focused on emerging cyber threats, digital trust, and AI security risks. During her Master’s studies in Cybersecurity at Zayed University, she spent years researching how artificial intelligence is changing the threat landscape and how increasingly realistic deepfakes can be used to spread misinformation, impersonate individuals, and manipulate public opinion.
Unlike many founders who start with a business idea, Bashayer started with a research question: How can ordinary people identify AI-generated content before it spreads online? That question eventually became Deepy. What began as an academic research project evolved into a startup focused on digital content verification.
Today, Bashayer regularly participates in entrepreneurship events, innovation programs, startup showcases, and technology conferences across the UAE to demonstrate Deepy’s capabilities, connect with industry leaders, and explore partnerships that can help bring the technology to a wider audience.
Building Deepy
Deepy was designed to help organizations verify whether a piece of digital content is authentic or manipulated using artificial intelligence. The platform allows users to upload images, videos, and audio files for analysis.
Instead of relying on a single detection method, Deepy combines artificial intelligence models with digital forensic techniques to look for traces that are commonly left behind during AI generation or content manipulation. The platform then generates a credibility assessment showing the likelihood that the content has been altered.
| Stage | What Happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Media Upload | Users upload an image, video, or audio file that needs verification. |
| 2. AI Screening | Deepy’s detection models scan the file for signs of AI generation or manipulation. |
| 3. Visual Analysis | The system examines facial expressions, eye movements, lighting, shadows, image artifacts, and frame inconsistencies. |
| 4. Audio Analysis | Voice recordings are checked for synthetic speech patterns, cloning indicators, and unnatural sound characteristics. |
| 5. Digital Forensics | Metadata, compression history, file structure, and digital fingerprints are analyzed for tampering signals. |
| 6. Risk Assessment | Multiple detection signals are combined to determine the likelihood of manipulation. |
| 7. Verification Report | The platform generates a credibility assessment and provides a confidence score for the uploaded content. |
The system is built around the same principles used in modern deepfake detection research, where AI models analyze pixel-level inconsistencies, facial movements, voice characteristics, metadata signals, and forensic artifacts that are often impossible for humans to detect manually.
Done By Youth Recognition
Deepy’s impact has already been recognized within the UAE’s innovation ecosystem. The startup received the prestigious “Done By Youth” badge from the Federal Youth Authority, an initiative that highlights projects and businesses created by young innovators who are contributing to the country’s development and future economy.
The recognition reflects Deepy’s work in addressing one of the fastest-growing challenges of the AI era. Beyond building a cybersecurity solution, Bashayer Al Salami has developed a platform that supports digital trust, combats misinformation, and helps organizations make informed decisions based on verified content.
The Road Ahead for Deepy
What started as a cybersecurity research project at Zayed University has grown into a startup focused on helping people verify digital content before misinformation spreads. Deepy is already contributing to the fight against deepfakes and manipulated media, and its work has received recognition from both the UAE startup and innovation ecosystem.
With Bashayer Al Salami continuing to improve the platform, showcase it at industry events, and explore new partnerships, Deepy has the potential to reach a much wider audience in the coming years. As AI-generated content becomes more common across the internet, solutions like Deepy will play an increasingly important role in helping people make informed decisions based on verified information.
