Kevin Tian

Engineering at Uber and Lyft

Tian spent four years at Uber as a senior software engineer, building real-time distributed systems, including technology for Uber's flying car initiatives. He then joined Lyft as a staff engineer and engineering manager. He holds a degree from Georgetown University. He met Madduluri at Uber in 2016.

From Crypto Impersonation to Social Engineering

Tian and Madduluri founded Doppel in 2022, first to help cryptocurrency companies deal with impersonation. Fortune reported that they soon saw a bigger problem, which Tian described as the most dangerous thing about AI is how easy it is to impersonate anyone.

He says Doppel's goal is not to stop deepfakes as such. our mission is not to stop deepfakes. It’s to stop social engineering attacks, he told Fortune, noting that companies now use benign digital avatars.

Protecting the People Trained to Help

Tian has singled out customer service staff as especially exposed. They’re trained to take phone calls, they’re trained to respond to messages, to comply with requests, to be patient. It’s a tough job, he told Fortune. He argues that training has to teach judgment: You can’t hard-code every role out there in the world.

Under his leadership Doppel has grown to more than 300 customers. In September 2026, when MUFG Innovation Partners became an investor, he said: Social engineering attacks are scaling, so we have to scale faster to help protect our customers.