Jun 26, 2025

Vermillio

Celebrity deepfake defier

Don Steinberg

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Vermillio CEO Dan Neely

Vermillio CEO Dan NeelyCourtesy Vermillio

Steve Harvey fans may think the actor is asking them to give money an awful lot these days—but it’s not really Harvey. In the era of AI deepfakes, celebrities are finding their images and voices repurposed in ways they don’t like, from pornography to scams asking fans for money. Vermillio helps them protect (and potentially license) their name, image, and likeness (NIL) data. “The thing that emerged last year is the people asking for this money were terrorist organizations,” says Vermillio CEO Dan Neely, who now works with Harvey and many other celebrities via partnerships with powerhouse talent agency WME and Sony Music (among other groups). Neely says the four-year-old startup is now scanning 99.9% of the internet—2 trillion items yearly—to identify AI-generated likenesses of clients, and work with platforms such as Meta and YouTube to have them taken down. Through its partnerships with talent agencies, Vermillio lets clients decide what they want to allow (like fan art), or monetize. It’s a fast-growing space: Revenue from the company's TraceID AI rights management platform has grown tenfold from April 2023 to April 2024. “All our customers start by wanting to protect themselves, and then all of them very quickly go into a place of monetization,” Neely says.