May 2026: founding Confrmo and building a live identity check

May was a founding month. On 7 May I incorporated Confrmo Ltd, the company behind the identity platform that most of my later work runs on. In the same weeks I started building two of its core products.

Proving a real person is present

An identity check is only as good as its weakest trick. A photo held up to a camera, a video played on another screen or a mask should never pass as the person it shows. So the first thing I built into the Confrmo iPhone app was an active liveness check: the app asks the person to do something a recording cannot, then decides whether a live human is really there.

Proving a face is real is only half of it. The second half is proving it belongs to this account. I bound the verified face to the signed-in user, so a face that passes for one account cannot be used to unlock another. You need both checks. I chose to build them together from the start.

The foundations of Couri

On 7 May I also laid down the foundations of Couri, verified email: the core services, the database and the build process that everything since has run on. I built it as one structure from day one, so it could grow into a full service without being rebuilt later. A day spent on foundations saves weeks of rework.

What it led to

These two pieces became the backbone of the year. The liveness check and the face bound to the account are what every later Confrmo feature leans on, from escrow to attendance to personal web addresses. Couri later gained sign-in with a verified Confrmo identity, so the two products I started in the same week ended up working together.