Billions reveals $30M backing, signs Sentient partnership

Decentralized digital ID startup Billions has disclosed $30 million in previously-unacknowledged investment received since the humanity-proving platform’s launch in February this year, in a sign of confidence in both the company’s offering and its promise in what is an emerging market.

The Billions Network launched its token-based, non-biometric digital identity verification product to compete with World ID, Civic and others in the proof-of-personhood (PoP) space. Billions has received total capital funding of $30 million so far from Coinbase Ventures, Polychain Capital, Polygon, Liberty City Ventures and Bitkraft.

The venture comes “from the team behind Privado ID” and is positioned as “a direct response to consumer demand and growing regulatory pressure for more accessible, secure, and mobile-first verification systems,” including those for use in age assurance and content authentication.

The agentic Internet is another arena that Billions is gunning for, with its newest partnership. Billions has inked a deal with Sentient, the community-owned AGI platform, to establish a foundational trust layer for the emerging agent economy. The collaboration aims to verify real users, track reputations, and ensure sybil-resistant reward mechanisms without compromising privacy.

As AI shifts from a background tool to an active participant that generates content, executes trades and makes decisions, users will need a new trust system, so the pitch goes.

“Every day, millions of humans interact with AI without knowing if they’re talking to a bot, scam artists, or a legitimate service,” says Evin McMullen, CEO and co-founder of Billions Network. “The status quo is neither secure, scalable, nor sustainable.”

Billions and Sentient argue that solving this trust deficit is essential if AI is to serve billions of people safely and equitably. “By integrating Billions’ progressive identity verification and reputation frameworks, we’re ensuring that our open AGI serves real humans, without advantaging unaccountable bots or malicious actors,” says Himanshu Tyagi, co-founder of Sentient.

Under the partnership, Billions will deliver its zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) identity platform to Sentient’s open-source ecosystem. Users prove their humanity privately via their phones, with no biometric data stored.

Sentient will integrate Billions’ reputation framework to attribute performance histories to both human and AI agents on-chain, creating a transparent record of safety and reliability.

Looking ahead, the two companies plan to set standards for human and AI collaboration — from proving individual humanity to verifying an AI agent’s origin and ensuring fairness in reward distribution.

Sam Altman’s World is another player in the humanity-proofing market, which is emerging as a need in a world increasing in AI generation, bots and bad actors impersonating real humans and organizations.

Billions has sought to differentiate itself from Altman’s World and has even appeared to take swipes at its rival, which is known for capturing biometric information via orbs, as it does not require proprietary hardware.

Billions Network has a mobile app that verifies user identities through NFC scans of biometric passports or national ID cards, biometric liveness checks and cryptographic proofs using Privado ID’s institutional KYC and infrastructure stack. Billions says it does not store any personal data.

Buterin provides another differentiation chance for Billions

Billions seized another opportunity for differentiation in a response to an essay by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Buterin’s post detailed the pros and cons of zero knowledge (ZK) identity systems, which poked at the World network in the course of carving its argument that digital ID systems using zero-knowledge proofs still have risks from “attempting to uphold a one-identity-per-person property.”

Billions Network has positioned its platform as a direct response to such concerns, which it elaborated on in its own post. Buterin warned that even zero knowledge (ZK) identity systems can enable coercion, surveillance and abuse if they rely on a single public identifier for each user. Billions Network says its solution preserves both uniqueness and user privacy by ensuring no global identifier is ever shared across services.

The Billions Network mobile app for iOS and Android devices supposedly addresses concerns highlighted by Vitalik. Every time a user interacts with a verifier — whether a government agency, financial institution or other organization — the system generates a fresh decentralized identifier (DID) that cannot be linked back to identifiers used elsewhere. This per-app pseudonymity model is designed to prevent centralized registries from correlating a user’s activities across multiple contexts.

Billions Network has also introduced DeepTrust, a framework that extends unique, reputation-based identities to AI agents, tying each bot’s credentials back to its human creator. By assigning transparent accountability to automated services, the company aims to curb the proliferation of anonymous bots and bolster trust in AI-driven interactions.

To avoid the risks of a single point of failure, Billions’ Privado.ID layer supports dozens of independent credential issuers. Verifiers choose which providers to trust and may require additional verification steps — such as age confirmation, country-based restrictions or enhanced KYC/AML checks — without ever exposing a master identifier. This pluralistic trust model aligns with Buterin’s call for systems that resist market dominance by any one provider and minimize systemic correlation risks.

Billions grew out of Privado ID, which “works alongside Billions to onboard organizations and governmental partners, and runs on any EVM-compatible chain.” It marks the firm’s latest evolution, following the outgrowth of Privado ID from PolygonID.

Billions Network reports that governments, financial institutions and global NGOs have already integrated its frameworks into existing identity workflows. The company is now inviting developers, enterprises and public-sector bodies to build on its open protocol stack, which the team describes as “a privacy model grounded in cryptography.”

Article Topics

Billions Network  |  decentralized ID  |  digital ID  |  funding  |  identity verification  |  proof of personhood