Helix, a startup building voice-based identity verification technology that runs on-device, has raised $6.2 million in a funding round led by Chicago Ventures, with Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus among its backers. Kittlaus will also serve as an adviser to the company. The startup is pitching voice as a way to confirm that users are human without requiring them to hand over sensitive personal information.
The round drew participation from BAM Ventures, Aglaé Ventures, Corazon Capital, Press On Ventures, Tusk Ventures, Yonder Ventures, Rule 30, and Brown Angel Group. Helix was founded in 2025 by Alex Oberg, Anna Dorofiyenko, and Mike Hall. Oberg previously worked at Ticketmaster, which acquired his startup; Dorofiyenko led data science teams at Live Nation and Zillow; and Hall 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 off the platform. He said the advance of AI over the past two years convinced him that determining who is human online would become increasingly difficult, and that proxies such as email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses and device IDs are no longer sufficient. With AI agents like Instinct and Muse on the rise, he argued the industry needs to rely on biometric signals such as voice.
Helix's core technology runs directly on a device to determine whether someone is human and to estimate their age. The company said its model runs locally even on an iPhone 13, keeping deployment costs minimal, and that its technology can replace or supplement CAPTCHA and help block bot attacks. Helix is also running pilots to explore whether voice can serve as a biomarker for conditions such as drunkenness or distress. One customer, in-home healthcare provider Zeel, uses the technology to verify the identities of providers visiting customers' homes.
Oberg said verifying workers such as cabdrivers is another use case under exploration. He also pointed to age-verification regulations for social media platforms worldwide, which he said force users to trade privacy for access, and described Helix's approach as a roughly four-second voice challenge that avoids that tradeoff. Oberg acknowledged limits: the technology cannot reliably detect whether someone is lying, does not identify individual speakers, and cannot reconstruct a person's voice even if the company stores a voiceprint. Helix also believes its technology is not yet capable of reliably detecting AI agents during live calls.
Kittlaus said voice-identification technology has finally reached a point where it works reliably, positioning Helix to scale as AI-powered fraud increases, and that the startup's work compressing its models gives it a cost advantage. He said Helix's approach differs from teaching computers to understand speech, focusing instead on what a speaker's speech reveals about their state.
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