Press

Everything a reporter needs, without having to ask.

Biographies cleared for publication, the subjects Louis-James Davis can speak to, and a dated archive of 60 pieces of coverage across 44 publications and broadcasters, each one linked to the original.

At a glance

  • Name Louis-James Davis. Hyphenated, and it is the spelling on the register and on every filing.
  • Roles Inventor of VCode. Founder and chief technology officer of Confrmo. Director of six UK registered companies.
  • Based Manchester, United Kingdom.
  • Intellectual property Named inventor on sixty-six patent families, sixty-one of them pending applications, first filed January 2016. The filing record.
  • Companies Registered numbers, statuses and roles at Companies and ventures.
  • Verify this profile The identity behind this site is checkable at louisjamesdavis.confrmo.com.

Short biography

Roughly sixty words. Cleared for publication as written.

Louis-James Davis is a British inventor and technology entrepreneur based in Manchester. He is the inventor of VCode, a verification technology, and the founder of Confrmo, an identity platform. He is a named inventor on sixty-six patent families in digital identity, verification, provenance and security, the first filed in January 2016.

Long biography

Cleared for publication. Every dated claim in it is sourced either on the story, at Patents, or in the coverage archive below.

Louis-James Davis is a British inventor and technology entrepreneur. He works on the problem of proving that a person, an object or an action is what it claims to be, and has done since 2012.

He was a professional drummer first. He reached Grade 8, performed internationally and taught more than 300 drummers across Greater Manchester before illness ended that in 2009. What followed was not software but hardware: the KMS Wristband, a one-button GPS telecare device for older people and people living with dementia, built in Manchester and shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2014.

The code-scanning work that became VCode followed. VCode links a physical or digital mark to a live record and the rules attached to it, so that what the mark means can be changed, refused or withdrawn after it has been printed. It was awarded a European Commission Seal of Excellence in 2018 for anti-counterfeiting and supply chain traceability. During the pandemic the same technology was turned into the V-Health Passport, a digital record of test and vaccination status built on a self-sovereign identity model, which was reported on by Sky News, CGTN, Biometric Update and the air travel and events trade press.

He is now founder and chief technology officer of Confrmo, which confirms that the authorised human is present at the moment something matters, rather than that somebody is holding a credential. He is a director of Confrmo Ltd, Couri Technologies Ltd, Towergate Capital Ltd, LunaNet AI Ltd, HlinGuard Ltd and Hire One Vet Ltd, all registered at Companies House.

He is a named inventor on sixty-six patent families, of which sixty-one are pending applications. The first was filed in January 2016 and has since been cited as prior art in later filings by Alipay, iCrypto, In-Idt and China Life Insurance. Each application is listed with its number, its applicant and its status on the public register.

He was named Tech Entrepreneur of the Year at the inaugural UK Business Tech Awards in 2018, took both Entrepreneur of the Year and the Chairman's Rising Star Award at the Made in Manchester Awards the same year, and was a regional winner at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards. He is an ambassador of the children's cancer charity Kidscan and a trustee of The Darwin, a registered charity. He was diagnosed with autism at 22. He lives in Manchester and has four daughters.

Available for comment on

Subjects he works in and can speak to on the record. Anything outside this list is better put to somebody who does it for a living.

Digital identity

Verifying a person rather than a credential, and what identity systems can and cannot prove.

Authentication

Passwords, one-time codes, passkeys, biometrics and liveness, and where each one actually fails.

Verification and provenance

Proving an object, a document or a communication is genuine, and why a printed code cannot do it.

Privacy engineering

Selective disclosure, cumulative disclosure and building systems that hold less rather than promising to.

Cybersecurity

Trust boundaries in consumer and enterprise systems, and attacks that use the system's own answers.

Applied artificial intelligence

Where machine judgement belongs in an identity decision and where it does not.

Regulation

The UK identity verification regime, the EU digital identity wallet, age assurance and online safety duties.

Technology entrepreneurship

Building and patenting from inside a working product rather than from a research programme.

Selected coverage

Newest first. Each row says what the relationship actually was: Interviewed means he answered questions and is quoted at length, Quoted means a line or two of his is carried in somebody else's piece, Bylined means he wrote it, Profiled means the piece is about him, Covered means it is about the company or the product, and Referenced means the work is named in a piece about something else. None of these is an endorsement by the publication and none is presented as one.

Every link goes to the publisher rather than to a copy. Where an original has been taken down, the row links to an archived copy and says so. Company announcements and newswire releases are not listed here at all: they are the subject talking, not somebody else reporting, and putting them in a coverage list is the thing that makes coverage lists untrustworthy.

Images and assets

  • Portrait Download, cleared for editorial use with the credit "Louis-James Davis".
  • Landscape Download, cleared for editorial use.
  • Company descriptions One line each, on Companies and ventures. Reproduce as written or shorten; please do not add a superlative that is not there.
  • Patent overview Application numbers, applicants, statuses and register links at Patents.

Two things worth getting right

Application, not patent

The sixty-one current filings are patent applications and the register gives their status as "pending", which is the word to use. "Patented technology" is not, and this site does not use the phrase anywhere. Every application number on the filing record links to its own register entry, so the status can be checked in a click.

A citation is not a licence

Later filings by Alipay, iCrypto, In-Idt and China Life Insurance cite the earlier disclosures as prior art. That means an applicant or an examiner found the earlier work relevant to whether their own invention was new. It is not infringement, licensing, use or any continuing right, and should not be written up as one.

Media contact

There is no press office. Enquiries go to Louis-James Davis directly at hello@louisjamesdavis.com. Say the outlet and the deadline in the first line and it will be answered faster.

Institutional, investment and partnership enquiries.

Four kinds of enquiry reach Louis-James Davis at the same address. Say which one you are in the first line and it is answered faster.

  • Investors What you invest in and the stage you come in at.
  • Partners What you would want to build or integrate.
  • Press Your outlet and your deadline in the first line.
  • Working together What you have built. Working code beats a CV.
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Based at 1 St Peter's Square, Manchester · Verified identity louisjamesdavis.confrmo.com