The hardest part of building trust on the internet has never really been the technology. It’s been the question nobody wanted to answer: is there a real human on the other end of this?

For most of the internet’s history, we could mostly assume yes. That assumption is now wrong.

AI agents can create accounts, generate content, transact, and coordinate at a scale no human can match. The infrastructure we built to connect people was never designed for this. When an agent takes an action, makes a transaction, or causes harm, who is accountable? Right now, nobody has a good answer.

That’s the question Alien is building the answer to. Alien is a decentralized identity network that verifies humans and cryptographically links AI agents back to the people who own them. We’re thrilled to share they’ve raised $7.1M, with Initialized co-leading the round.

The network verifies humans using biometric inference, social graph signals, and verifiable credentials, with no centralized server storing any of it. The result is a portable proof of humanity that works across applications and ecosystems. Agent ID is built on top of this, a verifiable identity system that ties AI agents back to a real, accountable person.

Alien launched mainnet alpha in December 2025. Users can verify their identity, receive an Alien ID, and earn Aliencoin, a currency distributed to verified humans. They’ve also shipped a mini app marketplace, an authentication and payments SDK for developers, and Solana integration for both web2 and web3 apps.

What drew me to Kirill is that he didn’t come to this problem theoretically. During the war in Ukraine, his own family was turned against each other by Kremlin bots and coordinated misinformation, and he watched it happen from the US, unable to stop it. He’s been thinking about what it actually means for bad actors to operate at machine scale well before it became a common worry in Silicon Valley. He also built Clever to 15 million users as a teenager, went through YC as a solo founder, and has consistently impressed me with how fast he ships and how clearly he thinks under pressure.

Proof of humanity is going from a nice-to-have to a prerequisite for operating on the internet. If you’re a developer building applications where knowing your users are real people matters, or if you want to be an early verified human, go try Alien on iOS or Android.