Alien, a startup looking to build trust infrastructure for the internet as the era of artificial intelligence agents changes how people interact with businesses and one another, today announced it has raised $7.1 million in pre-seed funding.

“Alien is building the trust infrastructure for the agentic economy,” founder and Chief Executive Kirill Avery (pictured) told SiliconANGLE in an exclusive interview.

The app verifies users without permanently storing biometric data or requiring government identification. It uses facial recognition through iOS and Android devices, Avery said, but retains that information only as long as needed to confirm that the person is real.

A phone alone, however, is not enough to prove humanity. Alien instead relies on what Avery describes as continuous human verification, drawing on social graph activity, connections to other people and probabilistic scoring over time to determine whether a human remains in control. During onboarding, that process gives users what the company calls Alien ID.

AI agents receive a corresponding credential called Agent ID, but the point is less about identifying agents for their own sake than tying them back to humans. Avery argued that the real need is not merely to let people register agents, but to give outside services a fast way to decide whether they can trust them. On the internet, reputation is everything.

The weakness in many emerging agent reputation systems, he suggested, is that they rely on a slow accumulation of behavioral history. Alien’s answer is to anchor an agent to a known human or group of humans, creating a lower barrier to reputation and accountability instead of waiting months for traceability to build up.

“You cannot just allow agents without reputation simply do anything on your website,” Avery said.

The rise of agentic AI

Right now, agentic AI is coming into vogue. Consumer available agentic AI browsers can work on behalf of users such as OpenAI Group PBC’s ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity AI Inc.’s Comet. This activity can go beyond simple research, such as discovering products on ecommerce pages, adding items to shopping carts, entering credit card information and making purchases.

Beyond agentic browsers, the landscape is continuing to change. Developer-centric open-source agents such as OpenClaw, which provides a privacy-focused framework that users can execute directly from their computers, enable anyone to launch an AI secretary right on their desk.

In the past, the idea of having a digital assistant felt like science fiction. Certainly, phones did this with Apple Inc.’s Siri and “Hey, Google,” with voice capabilities, but the AI agents of today are more powerful. They can autonomously reach out onto the web, search the internet, learn, purchase socks, plan trips, buy plane tickets and more.

The industry is rapidly progressing toward a user-first society where ordinary people will someday be able to sit down, click an app and have an AI agent — or even tens or hundreds of agents — at their beck and call. The question is: How do people on the other end know that a person with a sterling reputation is in command and control of those agents?

This future could have terrible repercussions for humanity. Avery has seen it himself.

He built the company partly for personal reasons. Misinformation and what he called “Kremlin bot” misinformation and propaganda around the Ukraine war tore his family apart in Russia while he watched from the United States. The evolution of the agentic AI era means that individuals no longer need to sit on social media typing out lines manually; armies of bots can roll into doomscroll screens to ensnare the unwitting.

The broader agentic identity industry

Alien is not alone in trying to solve identity and accountability for the coming agentic web. Vouched Identity Inc. has approached the problem from the enterprise verification and control side, while Billions Network S.A. is also building privacy-preserving identity infrastructure for both humans and AI agents.

“I think the broader opportunity space of foundational infrastructure for agentic identity, reputation and value exchange is one of the most pressing subjects in the evolution of the internet,” Billions Network Chief Executive Evin McMullen told SiliconANGLE in a previous interview.

Alien’s funding round included Initialized Capital, Finality, Mantaray, Commonmetal, Scenius, Lvna Capital, Pioneer and others. With the new capital, Avery said the money will be put toward pushing the protocol, app and the agent ID forward at speed.

The system is built on a blockchain, which provides the backbone for the operation. It also allows the app to decentralize across devices and track reputation. When users sign up on the mobile client they get access to a wallet, messaging and a mini-app marketplace aimed at verified humans. There developers get a chance to build new distribution models for cryptocurrencies, a robotics-data marketplace called Alien Work similar to Amazon Inc.’s Mechanical Turk task with uniqueness checks and game-like experiences.

Right now, Alien wants to become proof that a unique human exists, allow humans to delegate reputation to agents and give websites or platforms a way to know agents are trustworthy and accountable.

This will pave the way for users to provide payments and credential through Alien ID to agents while the company provides the primitives for agentic reputation and a grow developer community to use them.

Photo: Alien