Siri Co-Founder Backs Helix's Voice-Based Human Verification Tech

A startup called Helix is betting that voice can prove who's human online, without users handing over sensitive personal data. The company's technology runs directly on a user's device, and it has drawn backing from Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus, who will also serve as an advisor.

Helix raised $6 million 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 in 2025 by Alex Oberg, Anna Dorofiyenko, and Mike Hall. Oberg previously worked at Ticketmaster, which acquired his startup, and helped create Verified Fan to keep bots off the platform; Dorofiyenko led data science teams at Live Nation and Zillow; Hall worked at Nike and Tinder, where he helped develop the initial matching algorithm.

The core technology determines whether someone is human and estimates their age. Helix says its model can run locally even on an iPhone 13, keeping deployment costs minimal, and the company is 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 tech to verify providers visiting customers' homes. Oberg said verifying workers such as cab drivers is another use case under exploration, and that age-verification regulations worldwide are pushing users to trade privacy for access. "It's a four-second voice challenge," he said.

Oberg also stressed the technology's limits: it cannot reliably detect lying, it doesn't identify individual speakers, and even a stored voiceprint couldn't be used to reconstruct a person's voice, he claimed. Helix believes its tech isn't yet capable of reliably detecting AI agents during live calls. Kittlaus said voice identification has finally reached a point where it works reliably, positioning Helix to scale as AI-powered fraud grows, and that compressing its models gives the startup a cost advantage.