VeryAI Raises $10M to Fight Deepfakes
Boston-area startup VeryAI has raised $10 million to combat deepfakes and AI-driven identity fraud. The company uses smartphone-based palm-scan technology, gaining traction with banks, employers, and government agencies worried about synthetic fraud.
VeryAI's $10 million seed round was led by Polychain Capital, with participation from the Berggruen Institute and Anagram. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also invested as an angel investor. The funding will be used to scale VeryAI's "proof of reality" infrastructure. VeryAI's palm-scanning tech uses a smartphone camera to create encrypted biometric signatures, verifying users without storing identifiable data. A single hand scan has a false acceptance rate of 1 in 10 million, and scanning both hands drops that rate to 1 in 100 trillion. The company emphasizes that it does not store palm images, but rather irreversible feature representations. The rise of sophisticated AI has made traditional security measures like facial recognition and CAPTCHAs more vulnerable. VeryAI's technology is designed to combat deepfakes and synthetic identities, which are increasingly used in fraud. Synthetic identity fraud could cost the U.S. economy $30-$35 billion annually.
