For years, websites have relied on technology like CAPTCHA to prove that the user on the other end is human. More recently, social media platforms have turned to photos or videos to verify users’ identities. Now, a startup called Helix is betting that voice technology can do the same job, without requiring users to hand over sensitive personal information.
The voice technology, which can run directly on a user’s device, has attracted backing from Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus, who will also act as an advisor.
The company raised $6 million in funding in a round led by Chicago Ventures, with participation from BAM Ventures, Aglaé Ventures, Corazon Capital, Tusk Ventures, Yonder Ventures, Rule30, and Brown Alumni Group.
The startup was founded by Alex Oberg, Anna Dorofiyenko, and Mike Hall in 2025. Oberg previously worked at Ticketmaster, which acquired his startup; Dorofiyenko led data science teams at Live Nation and Zillow; and Hall has worked at Nike and Tinder, where he helped develop the initial matching algorithm.
At Ticketmaster, Oberg played a role in creating Verified Fan, which is designed to keep bots out of the platform. As AI advanced, he started thinking along the same lines for a new solution.
“As AI started to come up in the last two years, I was realizing that it’s going to make it increasingly difficult to determine who’s human and who’s not on the Internet. Identity on the Internet’s always been about proxies for identity, right? It’s your email, it’s your phone, it’s your IP address, it’s your device fingerprint, it’s your device ID,” Oberg said.
He noted that with the rise of AI agents like Instinct and Muse, the industry needs to rethink human identity on the internet and rely on biometric signals like voice, which is where Helix comes in.
Its core technology can run directly on a device to determine whether someone is human and estimate their age. The company is also running pilots to explore whether voice can be used a biomarker to detect conditions such as adrunkenness or distress.
The company can deploy its technology to replace or supplement CAPTCHA and help block bot attacks. Helix said that because its model can run locally even on an iPhone 13, the cost of deploying the technology is minimal. The startup said one of its customers is Zeel, an in-home healthcare provider that uses Helix’s tech to verify the identities of providers visiting customers’ homes.
Oberg said verifying workers, such as cab drivers, is another use case the startup is exploring. He also said that age-verification regulations for social media platforms around the world are forcing users to trade privacy for access. Helix’s voice technology, he said, could offer an alternative.
“There’s like an avalanche of regulation coming down because essentially society has decided children should not be able to use the Internet as adults. That has created a bit of a strawman argument that everyone needs to trade their privacy for the sake of security and child safety. We are that company that’s saying, nope, don’t agree. It’s a four-second voice challenge,” he said.
The CEO also emphasized the limitations of Helix’s technology, noting that it cannot reliably detect whether someone is lying. He added that its voice technology doesn’t identify individual speakers and claimed that even if the company stores a voiceprint, it cannot be used to reconstruct a person’s voice.
AI-powered fraud is also a growing problem in phone calls. But Helix believes its technology isn’t yet capable of reliably detecting AI agents during live calls.
Siri co-founder Kittlaus said that voice identification technology has finally reached a point where it works reliably, positioning Helix to scale as AI-powered fraud increases. He also said that Helix’s work to compress its models gives the startup a cost advantage.
“What folks at Helix are doing is, instead of teaching computers how to understand speech, these guys are understanding, what the speech of the speaker actually means, what’s going on with them, who they are they lying, are they impaired? That side of it is fascinating to me within the larger picture that I just described,” he told TechCrunch.
Source: techcrunch.com
