ARK Invest is founded on the principles of disruption. Founded by prolific investor Cathie Wood on the belief that disruptive innovation is key to growth, the firm has built a reputation for identifying the technologies that will define tomorrow.
But as any industry leader knows, high visibility comes with high risk.
For ARK Invest, a firm with a massive, engaged social media presence, that risk manifested in a relentless wave of digital impersonation.
As Mark Keller, ARK’s Chief Technology Officer, explains, the firm operates in financial markets where there’s no room for downtime, and there’s certainly no room for the reputational damage caused by bad actors exploiting the brand.
“We are very security conscious,” Keller says. “We have a very, very high-profile social media presence, so we have to face some of the downsides that come with that, with regard to impersonation and all sorts of strange nastiness that occurs on the internet.”
Dedicated to the future, ARK could no longer rely on manual, legacy methods to fight modern threats.
Here’s how ARK Invest partnered with Doppel to transition its defense from human speed to machine speed.
The Time-Consuming ‘Whack-A-Mole’ Era
Before partnering with Doppel, ARK Invest’s battle against social engineering was a manual, time-consuming struggle.
The nature of threats had evolved. What started as simple scams on a single platform morphed into complex, multi-channel attacks across LinkedIn, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Telegram, instantly traversing the digital ecosystem.
Matthew Staudt, ARK’s Brand Marketing Manager, recalls the frustration of that era. “When we originally started looking at some of the scams and impersonations on the internet, they started with a single platform,” he notes. “Since then, it’s really evolved. We tend to see social engineering attacks across all the social media platforms.”
The internal cost of managing this was staggering. The team was playing an endless game of ‘Whack-A-Mole,’ trying to chase down bad actors one by one, and the metrics from that period paint a bleak picture of the limitations of manual defense.
“Prior to Doppel, it would take us days to weeks to identify and remove a lot of these scams — if we could get them down at all,” Staudt says.
This delay frustrated more than just the organization’s marketing and IT teams. It directly impacted the investors ARK serves, too.
Staudt describes receiving hundreds of phone calls and emails every year from concerned individuals who spotted a fake account, or, worse, fell for a scam. Each call and email represented a potential loss of trust and a significant drain on internal resources, forcing the team to pivot from strategic work to damage control.
Fighting Machine Speed with Machine Speed
The turning point came when ARK Invest realized that today’s threats require a modern security defense fabric, one that integrates automated social engineering defense directly into the company’s operations.
“These attacks traverse platforms,” Keller explains.
“The ability to detect and track threats quickly is critically important in stopping these attacks from escalating and spreading.”
ARK chose Doppel as a strategic partner capable of matching the attackers' velocity. Doppel’s AI-native platform enabled simultaneous detection of impersonations across domains, social media, and the dark web, linking disparate signals into a single threat graph.
This is the disruptive innovation ARK needed for its own security posture.
By automating the detection and takedown process, Doppel relieved the ARK Invest team of the manual burden. The platform acts on issues rather than solely flagging them.
For Keller, this provided a profound sense of security. “The partnership that we have with Doppel allows us to feel reassured that we have one of the strongest products around to actively take down the bad actors that are ultimately spoiling the party for everyone else,” he says.
Quantifiable Risk Reduction with Doppel’s Platform
The impact of switching to an automated, AI-driven defense platform was immediate and measurable for ARK, with the most dramatic shift in remediation speed.
“Since we switched to Doppel, there are situations where we can get scams identified and removed within minutes, if not maybe a day or two,” Staudt reports.
Moving from weeks to minutes, with a 98% takedown success rate, fundamentally changed ARK Invest’s risk profile. Scams that previously had days to gather victims were now being neutralized before they could gain traction.
And this speed translated directly into a reduction in overall attack volume. By catching campaigns early (and often at the infrastructure level before they fully launch), Doppel prevents the spread that Keller warned about.
But perhaps the most meaningful metric for the ARK team is the silence. The barrage of panicked phone calls and emails from confused investors has significantly declined.
The data speaks for itself. “For example, in 2024, we had reports of around 400 impersonations and scams that we heard about directly,” Staudt says. “We’ve seen that number significantly decline year-over-year. [In 2025], that number has been basically cut in half.”
This reduction in noise allows the ARK team to focus on what they do best: driving innovation in the financial markets, rather than policing the dark corners of the internet.
To date, Doppel has surfaced over 10,500 alerts for ARK Invest, with a median domain resolution time of 5.5 hours.
Disruptive Innovation Between Partners
The partnership between ARK Invest and Doppel speaks to the value of cultural alignment. Both organizations understand that in a digital landscape that evolves around the clock, static defenses are liabilities.
“I’m excited to see the new features and functions that Doppel is going to expand into,” Keller says. “I would love to be able to plan a way to integrate those offerings into our overall IT fabric.”
ARK Invest chose Doppel to protect the integrity of its brand and its community’s safety. “Knowing that we’ve been able to reduce the amount of scams and impersonations is definitely a positive feeling,” Staudt concludes. “We know that there’s still a lot of work to be done, and that’s why we trust a company like Doppel, because they are always doing a great job researching and staying ahead of the trending scams.”
In 2026 and beyond, the only way to defend against AI-powered threats is with an AI-native platform. ARK Invest has proven that making the shift turns a vulnerability into a victory.
Request a demo to see why ARK Invest and other top brands choose Doppel’s AI-native platform to protect themselves from social engineering attacks.