Exclusive / Demand rises for ID verification amid AI advancements

From Washington to Wall Street, the demand for human verification tools is rising, as AI evolves and the geopolitical landscape grows more precarious.

One company trying to bridge the digital trust gap is Kibu, a startup that raised $10.5 million in its seed round, according to an announcement shared first with Semafor, and is now relaunching its app to move beyond offering what founder and CEO Ari Andersen described as encrypted “virtual SCIFs” or “virtual Sit Rooms.”

The revamped app allows individuals to confirm the identity of people they interact with, so they can build “trusted connections” without being tricked by AI or scammers.

“Think of it as human [multifactor authentication],” Andersen said.

The company, whose clients span financial services, family offices, and government, gained traction after “Signalgate” last year, but Andersen said there’s been more interest amid the Iran war and AI advances.

“Between AI and the geopolitical situation, I think everybody is just really aware and the threat is really crystallizing in people’s minds that, even a year ago, it wasn’t,” Andersen said. “What we’re seeing across the spectrum is a massive increase in interest, awareness, inbound desire to get on the platform.”

And Kibu is hardly the only company thinking about how to achieve ideal ID verification.

OpenAI’s Sam Alman cofounded World, which recently announced plans to partner with companies like Zoom and DocuSign to offer its identity verification tools — in the form of eye-scanning orbs.