The age of artificial intelligence, along with its transformative impact, is supercharging the threat of deepfakes and impersonation in the digital sphere. Long gone are the days where you can count a person’s fingers in an image to determine if it's real. Outputs from generative models are becoming indistinguishable as fake to the naked eye. To make the problem more complex, traditional deepfake detection strategies are pitting AI against AI, promoting models capable of more convincing forgeries.

Our latest addition to the Two Small Fish portfolio, SureMark Digital, is taking a different approach. We are delighted to announce our position as co-lead investor in SureMark Digital’s first institutional round.

Led by Drs. Scott Stornetta and Stuart Haber, the pioneering duo who co-invented blockchain technology and serial entrepreneurs, SureMark Digital is a new venture building the cryptographic verification layer for the internet. The SureMark team is bringing to life a decentralized system that allows anyone to prove identity in any digital interaction, certify the authorship of their own work, and publicly rebut misrepresentation or deepfakes.

SureMark’s approach accounts for a future where GenAI can be used to make verifiable content.

Stornetta and Habers’ expertise is legendary in having laid the foundational groundwork for blockchain technology. Stornetta and Haber’s work serves as the backbone for Web3 and directly inspired the creation of Bitcoin. Stornetta and Haber’s papers are the two very first citations in Satoshi Nakamoto’s famous white paper.

While applications like Signal and WhatsApp ensure end-to-end confidentiality, SureMark’s objective is end-to-end authenticity that verifies that the content has genuine authorship through trusted attestation. SureMark delivers their social provenance mechanism in a way that blends in seamlessly with existing user-client interfaces and mediums. Users will be able to verify in real-time the identity of anyone else with a valid SureMark credential — whether it be over the phone, in online meetings or via text — and certify or dispute content anywhere across the internet.

Through their decentralized system, SureMark is removing the need for third-party intermediaries to collect sensitive government or biometric information. This contact-level verification reinforces SureMark’s broader vision of a "web of trust", a decentralized but human-centric system for establishing identity and authenticity across the internet.

At Two Small Fish, we love backing teams that are creating novel technologies that will reshape large-scale behaviour. Scornetta, Haber and the SureMark team are doing just that by challenging the status quo in misinformation by reframing the debate from "artificial vs. real” to “unauthorized vs. verified”.