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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.

I don't know about you all, but lately whenever I interact with someone online, I'm wondering,

is this even a real person or is it a bot?

Some people call this the dead internet theory, the idea that most of the web is already controlled

by automation and algorithms.

As bots increasingly outnumber humans online, leading to an explosion of deepfakes and AI-driven fraud.

How can we prove humanity? One company is trying to solve this in a way that's straight out of

sci-fi, scanning your iris to verify your identity. Joining us today is Adrian Ludwig,

chief security officer and chief architect at Tools for Humanity, the company behind world

and those eye-scanning

orbs that you may have started noticing appearing around the globe.

Adrian, welcome to the show.

Thanks.

Happy to be here.

So you have a storied history.

I kind of like that this company, you've got a dual role of chief security and chief architect, because that tells me how deeply embedded security is into the product. And you have nearly 30 years in computer security and building internet services. Can you just give us a little bit of your background? I know you were at Android for a hot minute.

Yeah, a very hot minute. Pretty early on, actually, I was reached out and began working on Android when we had just a couple of devices and maybe a few million users. And by the time I left, we had over 2 billion users and hundreds of devices and manufacturers around the world.

I worked on building Android security. I also worked at Adobe for several years, building out the security

...