When a multinational corporation in Hong Kong reportedly wired $25 million to fraudsters in early 2024, the employees involved thought they were on a video call with their CFO. They weren't. The executive was an AI-generated fake, convincing enough to fool an entire finance team in real time.
That incident, perhaps more than any other, crystallized what had been a mostly theoretical concern into something boardrooms now actively worry about. And it's part of the reason VeryAI, a Miami-based startup that scans your palm through a smartphone camera to verify you're a real person, just closed $10 million in seed funding.
Polychain Capital led the round, announced in March 2026, with participation from Berggruen Holdings and Anagram. The company—which operates legally as Veros Inc. and was founded just last year—will use the capital to expand engineering and develop what it's calling a "Proof of Reality" platform.
Palm Reading, Reimagined
VeryAI's pitch hinges on an unusual biometric: your palm. Not a fingerprint. Not your face or iris. Your palm, scanned through the camera you already carry.
The company offers a mobile app for iOS and Android that uses palmprint biometrics to verify identity without specialized hardware. VeryAI claims the technology is highly accurate, built on what it describes as extensive scanning data and years of research and development. Bold claims, though the company hasn't released independent validation of those accuracy figures.
The platform bundles two functions. First, what VeryAI calls Proof of Personhood: palm authentication coupled with liveness detection to confirm you're not holding up a photo or video of someone else's hand. Second, Proof of Authenticity, which tackles deepfake detection across video, audio, images, and documents.
Crucially—especially given the regulatory headaches that have plagued other biometric identity startups—VeryAI says it doesn't store raw palm images. Instead, the system encrypts palm data into what the company describes as "irreversible descriptors." Users can delete their palm models through the app.
Whether that privacy architecture will satisfy regulators remains to be seen. Worldcoin's iris-scanning proof-of-personhood project hit temporary suspensions in Spain and elsewhere in 2024 over data protection concerns, a reminder that biometric identity verification sits in a legal gray zone in many jurisdictions.
The Team Behind It
VeryAI's Chief Science Officer, Hua Yang, brings relevant credentials. Yang co-founded Redrock Biometrics, where he served as CTO, and holds several patents in touchless palm acquisition technology, including one granted in 2022.
CEO Zach Meltzer comes from a different world entirely: crypto loyalty programs. He previously led growth at Galxe, a blockchain-based identity and rewards platform, helping scale it past 6,000 partners and 34 million users. That Web3 background shows up in VeryAI's product roadmap and investor base.
Follow the Money
Polychain Capital, the lead investor, operates squarely in crypto. Founder Olaf Carlson-Wee built the firm into one of the sector's most prominent venture funds. Anagram, another participant, functions as a crypto-native venture studio focused on on-chain products. Berggruen Holdings rounds out the list, representing the Berggruen family's investment arm. Koonal Gandhi, CIO at Berggruen, participated in the round, though VeryAI's announcement included no investor quotes—an unusual omission for a seed-stage funding press release.
The investor composition telegraphs where VeryAI sees its initial market: Web3 infrastructure, where proving someone is human (and not a bot or AI agent) has become a surprisingly urgent problem.
A Market Shaped by Fear
The timing isn't accidental. Deepfake fraud has moved from science fiction curiosity to line item on risk registers.
Industry reports suggest that a significant majority of mid-to-large organizations have experienced deepfake attacks, with many reporting actual monetary losses averaging in the hundreds of thousands per incident. Financial services firms have it worse: a Regula study from late 2024 pegged average deepfake-related losses in that sector above $603,000 per company, with roughly 23% of finance organizations reporting losses north of $1 million.
Meanwhile, AI bot traffic surged roughly 300% year-over-year in 2025, according to Akamai. The internet, it turns out, is increasingly populated by things that aren't people.
Early Adoption
VeryAI has started integrating with Web3 platforms, perhaps unsurprisingly given Meltzer's background. The company records verification events on Solana using something called ZK Compression from Light Protocol, which VeryAI says cuts costs by approximately 5,000 times compared to standard on-chain storage.
In early March, palm-scan verification went live as a credential option within the Galxe ecosystem—Meltzer's old stomping grounds. VeryAI also powers ClawKey, a service that lets users prove human ownership of autonomous AI agents through palm authentication. (Yes, we've reached the point where you need to prove you control your AI.)
The company's Android app shows over 1,000 downloads and was updated March 8. The iOS version received its most recent update around March 10-12. VeryAI operates with hubs in Miami, New York, and San Francisco. LinkedIn lists the team at 2–10 employees, though that figure likely predates both the funding and any hiring it enables.
VeryAI says it holds SOC 2 and iBeta certifications, standard credentials for security-focused startups, though certificate details weren't publicly available on the company's website.
A Crowded Field
VeryAI isn't alone in chasing the deepfake detection market. Reality Defender raised $15 million in Series A funding back in September 2023 for synthetic media detection. Pindrop, focused on voice authentication and deepfake detection, surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in April 2025. More recently, Sensity AI pulled in $2 million in early 2026 for what it markets as "forensic-grade deepfake detection."
The $10 million will go toward expanding VeryAI's engineering team and accelerating product development beyond the initial palm-scan system. The company is actively hiring across business development, operations, engineering, and research.
Whether palmprint biometrics become the standard for proving you're real online, or whether they end up as a footnote in the wider identity verification wars, remains an open question. But for now, at least, investors seem willing to bet that your hand might hold the answer.
