For years, know your customer checks have become commonplace on the internet. Often, this involves sharing a copy of a government-issued ID and a selfie to confirm identity to access a website, app, or to purchase certain goods. Now, age-verification laws taking effect across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and beyond are giving rise to an entire industry of ID-checking companies charged with granting access to the adult web.
Uploading identity details and a selfie to a company’s servers has long concerned privacy advocates. They fear 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. With this approach, a person’s sensitive information never leaves their phone.
The company is part of Startup Battlefield and plans to show off its new technology at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, which runs from October 27 through 29 at Moscone West in San Francisco. TruSources’ founder and chief technology officer, Sanjay Krishnamurthy, previously worked on the core encryption engine at WhatsApp. He explains that he developed his technology initially to help prevent scams, many of which rely on duping unsuspecting victims into handing over sensitive information that scammers use to cash in.
His company developed a deepfake-detection app and a know your customer 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, unlike most age- and identity-checking companies. Instead, TruSources’ technology relies on a custom machine learning model built into its apps. This model 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 must 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 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 present 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 know your customer rules. It does this while protecting those companies from having to collect people’s government-issued identity documents and preserving users’ privacy. He noted that a handful of countries have mandated that all apps need to know a user’s age, creating a significant problem because companies do not want to handle IDs from all over the world due to various legal implications.
TruSources is still in its early days but stands out as one of the few startups tackling identity checks and age verification without compromising a person’s privacy or security.