Persona, the global identity platform, has helped shape the industry's response to emerging threats to online identity, from bot impersonation, AI-powered fraud and identity theft, publishing proprietary data and research that inform trust and safety teams, academics and policymakers. Today, Persona is taking those efforts a step further, introducing the Persona Research Grant program.
Establishing who is real online has never been more difficult, or more consequential. The financial toll alone is significant: Americans reported losing a record $15.9 billion to fraud in 2025, according to the Federal Trade Commission, up 27% in a single year and nearly five times what they lost in 2020. The FBI's Internet Crime Report puts cybercrime losses even higher, at $20.9 billion.
AI and bots are accelerating the problem. Generative tools let bad actors clone faces and voices, impersonate real people and trusted brands, and run attacks at massive scale. According to Thales' 2026 Bad Bot Report, automated traffic now makes up 53% of all internet activity.
"The world is pouring unprecedented investment into making AI more capable, but far less into the other side of the equation: proving there's a real person behind the screen, protecting their privacy and making sure everyone can participate online," said Charles Yeh, co-founder and chief technology officer of Persona. "This year alone, our research has mapped how selfie fraud actually happens, earned recognition at the field's top venues and helped power Persona Relay, which lets people prove they're human without revealing who they are. Through our grant program, we're bringing more researchers into that work, because keeping the internet human is too important for any one company to take on alone."
Persona's Research Grant program offers researchers more than funding. Grant recipients collaborate with team that builds identity systems used in real world, and Persona supports publishing results. To date practice has partnered with University at Buffalo to build taxonomy and benchmark for selfie fraud, collaborations with University of Connecticut on privacy-preserving cryptography, and currently working with University of North Carolina on detecting fraud in selfie videos. Two research papers accepted to CVPR 2026.
About Persona
Persona is an identity platform that gives organizations the building blocks to securely collect, verify, manage and act on information about individuals and businesses. Persona combines identity verification, fraud prevention, orchestration and identity operations in a unified platform designed to help organizations adapt their identity programs as risks, regulations and use cases change. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, Persona serves organizations across industries, including fintech, marketplaces, AI platforms, workforce, retail, and more, with global identity capabilities available across more than 200 countries and territories.
