Meet the Atlanta Startup Taking on Bots, Deepfakes, And Online Identity Problems
ATLANTA, July 9 (Hypepotamus) – What’s real on the internet anymore?
AI “slop” was so ubiquitous in our social media feeds so much last year that it was the Merriam-Webster’ word of the year. CAPTCHA is obsolete, making it harder to really determine who is real…and what is just a bot…online. Deep fakes becoming harder to catch.
The core problem in our AI Age is online identity. And currently, there is no great way to prove your identity online.
But technologist-turned-entrepreneur Ken Griggs is building an answer. His Atlanta-based startup Julia Social and its product not.bot is an identity verification platform for individuals and companies alike.
“Proof of Personhood” with not.bot
Not.bot makes it possible to confirm someone is old enough for a service, or simply confirm they’re human, without handing over any extra personal information. Its Verify platform sorts real users from bots and burner accounts and checks age thresholds. A user proves they’re human once, then re-confirms with ease in every session after that.
Not.bot currently has its not.bot app and its not.bot Verify products available. The not.bot app runs on a user’s phone. Today, enrollment happens by scanning the NFC chip embedded in a passport: the app checks the passport’s cryptographic signatures to confirm it’s genuine and unexpired, then builds a digital identity from it. The passport data itself never leaves the device and not.bot only receives cryptographic proof that a real, unique person with a valid passport is behind the identity.
Businesses and enterprises benefit from this system because it can prevent account sharing, improve authorization and customer service authentication, as well as create better access control and hiring practices.
Businesses run not.bot Verify as software on their own cloud, meaning Julia Social itself never collects that data, Griggs told Hypepotamus. While personal information is not collected, it still complies with law enforcement needs.
As Griggs explained, “not.bot is the only proactive way to protect yourself from deepfakes.” Later this summer, not.bot plans to launch Sign My Work, a platform built to confirm that a piece of content came from a real person.
“We’re targeting people at risk of direct financial or reputational losses,” Griggs told Hypepotamus. He pointed to influencers and video podcasters who earn revenue through endorsements or brand building, social media marketers, college athletes, and politicians as likely early users.
Get to Know the CEO
The company’s name is a nod to Julia, the character in George Orwell’s “1984” who held onto a measure of personal agency in a surveillance state by guarding her privacy closely.
Griggs describes himself as a technologist first and says the CEO role wasn’t one he originally pictured for himself. He previously served as chief architect of the Climate Action Data Trust, a decentralized system for recording and monitoring climate-positive projects worldwide. The UN and World Bank originally conceived the project to support the Paris Agreement, giving countries a secure way to share data about their climate-positive initiatives. That work relied on multi-party computation, a cryptographic method that carries into not.bot’s architecture.
That same instinct against surveillance shapes how Griggs talks about the product. “I don’t want to be watched, I don’t want to be tracked, I don’t want any company to be able to tell that my interactions with them is the same as my interactions with some other company,” he said.
Griggs said what excites him most about the business is its ability to help public figures and brands protect themselves from malicious work online.
Julia Social has scaled to date through angel investment.
