AI startup Helix announced it has raised $6.2 million in funding, led by Chicago Ventures, with participation from BAM Ventures, Aglaé Ventures, Corazon Capital, and other investors. The company plans to use voice recognition technology that can run locally on users’ devices to replace or supplement traditional CAPTCHA verification, determining whether a user is human and estimating their age without collecting sensitive personal information. Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus has backed the project and will serve as an advisor to the company.
Helix was founded in 2025 by Alex Oberg, Anna Dorofiyenko, and Mike Hall. Oberg previously helped develop Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan feature, which is mainly used to prevent bots from snapping up tickets. As generative AI and agent technologies advance, traditional identity verification methods that rely on email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, and device fingerprints are facing greater challenges. Helix hopes to provide a new solution through voice as a biometric signal.
According to the company, Helix’s models can run locally on devices including the iPhone 13 to identify real people and estimate age, while helping platforms block bot attacks. Its current customers include Zeel, an in-home healthcare provider that uses the technology to verify the identities of healthcare workers. The company is also exploring identity verification for taxi drivers and use cases that use voice recognition to detect states such as intoxication and mental stress.
Helix emphasizes that the technology can determine whether a speaker is human, but it cannot identify a specific speaker or reliably determine whether they are lying, and it currently cannot reliably detect AI agents on live calls. Dag Kittlaus believes that advances in model compression and speech recognition give Helix a cost advantage. As AI-generated content and automated attacks increase, voice-based, privacy-preserving identity verification could become a new technological path beyond traditional CAPTCHAs.
