For years, “know your customer” checks have become commonplace on the internet, often by way of sharing a copy of your government-issued ID and a selfie to confirm that it’s really you, to access a website or app, or to purchase certain goods.
Nowadays, age-verification laws taking effect across the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, and beyond are also giving rise to an entire industry of ID-checking companies charged with granting you access to the “adult” web.
But uploading your identity details and selfie to a company’s servers has long had privacy advocates spooked and fearful that this sensitive information could be monetized, lost, or stolen in a data breach.
A new startup called TruSources aims to solve some of these privacy and security challenges by performing age-verification and identity checks on a person’s device, without the person’s sensitive information ever leaving their phone. The company is part of Startup Battlefield and plans to show off its new technology at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, which runs October 27 through 29 at Moscone West in San Francisco.
TruSources’ founder and chief technology officer, Sanjay Krishnamurthy, who worked on the core encryption engine at WhatsApp, tells TechCrunch that he worked on his technology initially to help prevent scams, many of which rely on duping unsuspecting victims into handing over their sensitive information that the scammers use to cash in.
His company developed a deepfake-detection app and a “know your customer” (KYC) app, which can be used to verify a user’s liveness on-device in a few seconds.
Krishnamurthy says that when a user verifies their identity with TruSources, none of their information is uploaded to its servers like most age- and identity-checking companies do. Instead, TruSources’ technology relies on a custom machine learning model baked into its apps that detects patterns from an existing dataset that the company developed to spot deepfakes and false identity cards.
TruSources’ technology can be integrated with other apps and websites that have to comply with age-verification laws. The technology can also be integrated into corporate single-sign-on services, which allow employees to access multiple work apps with just one set of credentials.
The apps can also produce a QR code for use in the real world, such as when proving a person’s age to enter a bar without having to give over a physical copy of their identity documents.
Krishnamurthy said his technology will help companies that are subject to age-verification and identity checks to be compliant with KYC rules, while both protecting those companies from having to collect people’s government-issued identity documents and preserving users’ privacy.
“A handful of countries have mandated that all apps need to know your age, and they’ve made a huge problem because they don’t want to take the IDs from all over the world and there’s all kinds of legal implications,” Krishnamurthy tells TechCrunch.
TruSources is still in its early days but stands out as one of the few startups tackling identity checks and age verification but without compromising a person’s privacy or security.
If you want to learn more about TruSources — and dozens of other startups, hearing their pitches, and listening to guest speakers on four different stages — join us at Disrupt, taking place October 27 to 29, in San Francisco.
Learn more about tickets and pricing here.
