- VeryAI raised $10 million in seed funding, led by Polychain Capital, to launch a smartphone-based palm verification system.
- The platform reports a false acceptance rate of 1 in 10 million when scanning one hand, and 1 in 100 trillion when both hands are verified.
- The Solana-based startup names Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s co-founder, as a backer.
VeryAI just completed its latest seed round, gathering $10 million, to help solve a new issue emerging in the next epoch of the digital economy: telling the difference between AI and humans.
The platform announced the seed round led by Polychain Capital today, with additional backing from Berggren Institute and Anagram. VeryAi is set to kick things off with a palm scanner that works with users’ smartphone cameras.
The company’s solution is being touted as the answer to outdated authentication systems that are not suited to a world where CAPTCHA is solved by machine learning and facial recognition has proven insufficient.
Why does VeryAI scan palms instead of faces?
VeryAI scans palms because they are rarely captured or posted online, making them more secure and almost impossible to copy.
People’s faces are already everywhere: social media platforms, tagged photos, and public databases all hold your image, and AI can grab faces immediately, duplicate them, and then create a convincing copy.
With only users’ phone cameras, VeryAI has reported a 1 in 10 million chance of failure when checking just one hand. The industry benchmark for this kind of testing is around 1 in 1 million. Additionally, the company claims that error rates drop drastically to 1 in 100 trillion when both hands are verified.
Zach Meltzer, the CEO of VeryAI, disclosed in a statement: “Privacy is a human right, but deepfakes and synthetic content present weaknesses that current systems simply can’t keep up with.”
Zack heads VeryAI after his previous role at Galxe, helping the firm grow to 6,000 partners and 34 million users.
VeryAI uses ZK and SAS tech to ensure privacy
VeryAI is built on Solana and backed by Solana’s cofounder, Anatoly Yakovenko, taking part as an angel investor. The system saves palm scans on Solana, leveraging the network’s speed and affordability for the frequency of these checks in real-world scenarios.
The best part of the platform is its privacy. By storing the mathematical patterns of users’ palms instead of the photos, these images can be discarded to prevent data leaks and privacy breaches.
VeryAI uses zero-knowledge (ZK) proof and Solana Attestation Service (SAS) to allow users prove their identities without sharing personal details. Once the identity is confirmed, the system creates an identifier to link the action to a specific individual.
VeryAI tackles identity and deepfake problems
The platform lets crypto exchanges and fintechs integrate the palm verification system into their platforms. It charges partners through a monthly subscription system, and it does not require additional hardware since it only uses the phone’s camera.
“Every major platform, whether in finance, crypto, or social media, is grappling with the risks of AI-driven fraud,” said Olaf Carlson-Wee of Polychain Capital. “VeryAI’s palm verification technology closes that gap with accuracy, privacy, and accessibility that no other biometric identity solution has yet to match.”
VeryAI does not solve the deepfake problem completely; however, it removes a critical piece of the puzzle.
The platform’s palm scan feature ensures that the person behind a transaction is indeed human.
As for deepfake content on social media, it makes it more difficult for AI-generated accounts to be verified on platforms using VeryAI technology.
However, the $10 million funding is being touted as proof of confidence in the VeryAI model of humanness verification, with backers forecasting the less invasive palm scanning technology to become more widely adopted than alternatives such as iris scanning. The ZK and SAS tech portion also cuts out the risk of bad actors gaining access to personal data in the case of a data breach.
