Siri co-founder backs Helix for voice authentication technology

Websites have historically depended on tools like CAPTCHA to confirm that users are human, while social media networks have recently moved toward using photos or videos for identity verification. A new startup named Helix is now proposing that voice technology can perform this function without necessitating the disclosure of sensitive personal data.

This voice-based solution operates locally on a user's device and has secured backing from Dag Kittlaus, a co-founder of Siri, who will also serve as an adviser to the firm. The company successfully raised $6.2 million in a funding round spearheaded by Chicago Ventures, with additional investment from BAM Ventures, Aglaé Ventures, Corazon Capital, Press On Ventures, Tusk Ventures, Yonder Ventures, Rule 30, and the Brown Angel Group.

Established in 2025, Helix was founded by Alex Oberg, Anna Dorofiyenko, and Mike Hall. Oberg previously held a position at Ticketmaster following the acquisition of his former startup, while Dorofiyenko managed data science teams at Zillow and Live Nation, and Hall contributed to early matching algorithms at Tinder and worked at Nike.

During his time at Ticketmaster, Oberg contributed to the development of Verified Fan, a system created to prevent bots from accessing the platform. As artificial intelligence continued to evolve, he began considering similar approaches for modern identity challenges.

“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 stated.

He suggested that the emergence of AI agents like Muse and Instinct requires the industry to reconsider online human identity by utilizing biometric signals such as voice. Helix is designed to address this need by running its core technology directly on hardware to verify human status and estimate age.

The firm is currently conducting pilot programmes to assess whether voice can function as a biomarker for identifying distress or drunkenness. Helix claims its technology can serve as a substitute or addition to CAPTCHA to mitigate bot attacks, noting that the model functions locally on devices as old as an iPhone 13, keeping deployment costs low.

One current client is the in-home healthcare provider Zeel, which uses the system to verify the identity of healthcare workers during home visits. Oberg mentioned that the company is investigating further applications, such as verifying cabdrivers, and believes their voice technology offers a privacy-conscious alternative to current age-verification requirements on social media.

“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,” Oberg said.

The CEO clarified that the technology has limitations, as it cannot reliably determine if a person is being dishonest. He further noted that while the system verifies that a speaker is a unique human, it does not identify specific individuals, and stored voiceprints cannot be used to reconstruct a person’s voice. Furthermore, the startup believes its current technology is not yet capable of reliably detecting AI agents during live phone calls.

Kittlaus remarked that voice-identification technology has finally achieved reliable performance levels, allowing Helix to grow as AI-related fraud rises. He also highlighted that the startup’s method of compressing models provides a financial 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, if they are lying, are they impaired? That side of it is fascinating to me within the larger picture that I just described,” Kittlaus said.