Persona helps companies like OpenAI, LinkedIn and Reddit verify the identities of millions of users at a time when AI agents have made it increasingly difficult to do so. Now, it has $200 million in fresh funding from top VC firms.<\/p>\n
The internet is drowning in bots.<\/strong> They already make up about 50% of all internet traffic<\/a>\u2014 a number that\u2019s poised to skyrocket to 90<\/a>% by 2030 as people start using so-called AI agents to do mundane internet tasks on their behalf, like open accounts, shop for shoes, buy tickets and order food.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a huge problem for companies. Online retailers don\u2019t want bots to scoop up coveted products faster than any human could, banks need to make sure fraudsters aren\u2019t able to take over accounts and social networks want to keep out impersonators. Nor do they want to prevent the growing number of good bots from doing what their owners intend.<\/p>\n Throw artificial intelligence into the mix, and it gets worse. Old-school bot detection techniques like CAPTCHAs\u2014 where users are asked to select squares that contain a motorcycle or decipher a scrambled word to prove they\u2019re humans\u2013 are simply no match for sophisticated models. And AI has also made it magnitudes easier to mimic a person\u2019s voice, spoof their face and create fake IDs<\/a>, according to Rick Song, cofounder and CEO of identity verification platform Persona.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe this constant distinguishing of \u2018is this a bot or not,\u2019 is kind of a pointless distinction that may not make sense anymore,\u201d Song, 34, told Forbes. \u201cThe real question is just who’s behind the AI and what\u2019s their intent.\u201d<\/p>\n Making sure that a user is who they say they are is at the core of San Francisco-based Persona, which offers ID authentication software to 3,000 companies including OpenAI, LinkedIn, Etsy, Reddit, DoorDash and Robinhood. It uses a blend of methods to verify a person\u2019s identity, including asking them to upload a photo of their government ID, take a selfie or record a video while turning their head or blinking, or scan the NFC chip embedded in a passport. In case a person poses significant risk, they may be asked to take a \u201cliveness test\u201d, where they are asked to hold up their ID and move their face to prove they are alive and are the real owners of their ID. The company\u2019s machine learning models can also pick up risk signals such as the network a person\u2019s using, how far they are from the location on their ID, the way they\u2019re interacting with a device and their online presence.<\/p>\n \u201cEven today, a lot of bot activity is very mechanical in nature,\u201d Song says. \u201cA lot of bots tend to use copy paste way more, or there’s more hesitations between inputs or just a very rhythmic kind of behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n Founded in 2018, Persona announced on Wednesday it has raised $200 million in Series D funding led by Ribbit Capital and Founders Fund along with participation from existing investors Coatue, Index Ventures, First Round Capital and Bond. Song said his company, now valued at $2 billion and with $417 million in total funding, signed $100 million worth of annual contracts last year.<\/p>\n Persona\u2019s success stems from building customized verification processes, called \u201cflows,\u201d that cater to its customers\u2019 specific needs and are adjusted based on the precise use case and risk level a person presents. For instance, Persona creates a different flow for a person trying to verify their age to order alcohol on a food delivery app versus for someone applying for a loan. \u201cThere’s no one size fits all for identity,\u201c Song said.<\/p>\n \u201cCompanies treated identity as a silver bullet. But what I’d seen was that there wasn’t a single way to solve all this.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Rick Song, CEO and cofounder of Persona<\/p><\/blockquote>\n OpenAI uses Persona to screen hundreds of millions of users across 225 countries signing up for ChatGPT and its API, ensuring that people on international watchlists and sanction lists don\u2019t slip through and use its models in harmful and illegal ways. People who aren\u2019t flagged as risky users don\u2019t need to go through a more extensive verification process or have their accounts manually reviewed, reducing friction during signups. Online learning platform Coursera turned to Persona to verify its 168 million users in 200 countries based on the class they\u2019re taking, with someone accessing a university-accredited course vetted differently than a casual learner to ensure it\u2019s a smooth onboarding process. DoorDash started using Persona during the pandemic to run background checks on the deluge of delivery workers coming to its platform, requiring them to submit selfies and match them against a government ID.<\/p>\n But while bots and fraudsters have always been part of the internet, AI presents a staggering new challenge. U.S. companies lose anywhere from $18 billion to $31 billion each year due to AI-based attacks, according to a report<\/a> by cybersecurity firm Imperva. Global losses from bot attacks, where scammers run up server costs, range from $68 billion to $116 billion. One way bots attack businesses is by creating fake accounts that can cash in on incentives like referral credit, discounts and promotions.<\/p>\n People may decide to use bots or AI-generated content for valid reasons such as having a language barrier or a disability. Good bots made up 14% of automated traffic in 2024, while malicious bots were responsible for 37% of internet activity, according to the Imperva study.<\/p>\n In scenarios where the bot usage can be traced back to a human and their reasons for using AI can be verified, \u201cwe want to make sure that we’re not taking a sledgehammer approach,\u201d said a senior director of regulatory affairs at one company that uses Persona to verify new users\u2019 identities.<\/p>\n Outsourcing ID verification to Persona tackles multiple challenges at once. One company that struggles with fake profiles on its platform opted for Persona to verify real people because doing it in-house would require expensive engineering resources. \u201cWe just want somebody to solve the problem for us,\u201d an engineer at the company told Forbes. Another customer said they chose to use Persona because they didn\u2019t want to store people\u2019s personally identifiable information.<\/p>\n Persona stores the data it collects from its customers\u2019 users on AWS and GCP servers, but that data is owned and managed by the companies themselves. Dealing with troves of sensitive data comes with its own issues: In October 2024, Persona faced a class action lawsuit alleging that it collected some Illinois-based users\u2019 personally identifiable information from driver\u2019s licenses and selfies and used it to train its AI models. The lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiffs. A similar lawsuit filed in February 2024 alleged that the company collected and stored biometric data such as facial geometric scans of DoorDash delivery drivers in Illinois without their consent. Persona spokesperson Evelyn Ju said the claims are baseless and that the company has \u201calways taken a privacy and compliance-first approach.\u201d<\/p>\n Persona is a newer player in the identity verification market, said Akif Khan, a VP analyst at Gartner. It\u2019s up against firms like airport biometric identity verification platform Clear Secure, which went public in 2021 and recorded $770 million in revenue in 2024, and Sunnyvale-based Jumio, which provides AI-based tools for ID verification and claims to have processed more than $1 billion in transactions. Then there\u2019s even newer companies like Sam Altman\u2019s Worldcoin<\/a>, which uses a spherical biometric device dubbed an \u201corb\u201d to scan people\u2019s irises in exchange for crypto tokens\u2014a rather bizarre way to prove a person is real and human.<\/p>\n Khan noted, though, that businesses are wary of the increasing threat of deepfakes, which could translate to more business opportunities for Persona given its use of online risk signals, he said.<\/p>\n Persona CEO Rick Song (left) and CTO Charles Yeh (right) started the company after Song realized the need to use software and automation to verify millions of users signing up to platforms.<\/p>\n Persona<\/p>\n Back when Song started Persona in 2018, identity verification was mostly done by human teams based in Eastern Europe, said Thomas Laffont, cofounder of tech investment firm Coatue Management who wrote a $750,000 check in the company\u2019s seed round that year and has invested in every round since. Song\u2019s idea was to use software instead. \u201cThat enabled them to be priced more competitively and to allow customers to use the product more. Because if every time a human was in the loop, it’s kind of a bottleneck,\u201d Laffont tells Forbes.<\/p>\n Song had previously spent five years working on identity fraud solutions as an engineer at point-of-sale software giant Square, which in the early \u201810s launched products like digital payment app Cash App and loan provider Square Capital\u2014both of which required different ways to verify someone. Song realized that a flexible, automated software solution could be customized to fit a company\u2019s verification needs. He teamed up with then-roommate Charles Yeh, now Persona\u2019s CTO, to build it.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fundamental challenge for identity online is that it’s this uncertain thing and it’s used for all sorts of things from compliance to trust and safety, from fraud prevention to security,\u201d Song said. \u201cCompanies treated identity as a silver bullet. But what I’d seen was that there wasn’t a single way to solve all this.\u201d<\/p>\n AI agents will require yet another solution. Song said he envisions that companies building agents will need to register the bots so that it\u2019s easier to spot them. As for humans, Persona hopes to build identity profiles for each person using the hundreds of activities they do online over time, like ordering food or scrolling social media, so Persona can more quickly verify they\u2019re human. Song said these profiles would be tamper resistant and reusable so that they can be submitted on any site during the verification process, which he thinks people will want to use despite the obvious privacy tradeoffs.<\/p>\n \u201cToday you’re disclosing more and more about yourself. You’re just giving up so much information,\u201d Song said. \u201cOur dream is this idea of a self-sovereign, personally-owned portable identity.\u201d<\/p>\n \nMore From Forbes<\/strong>Forbes\u2018Shock And Awe\u2019: How Trump Took Over Washington\u2014And The World\u2014In 100 DaysBy Dan Alexander<\/a>ForbesGiving Pledge Signers On Why The 15-Year-Old Group Still MattersBy Kerry A. 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