A Chip That Exposes "Superfakes": Startup Veritas Raised 1.75 Million Dollars to Defend Luxury Brands From Copies

A copy of a luxury product is no longer just a badly stitched bag from the market. Counterfeiters copy brand markings so well that the best imitations have earned their own name - "superfakes." Startup Veritas claims the solution is a chip built into the product itself.

The company was founded by Lucy Holland, a former technical product manager at Tesla, with a background in design and art. The chip is inserted into the product without damaging it. Through it the brand verifies whether the item is genuine, and the buyer can show a certificate of ownership in the app. Holland says other methods are easier to get around, because a QR code or a static NFC link is easily copied. "Our chip generates a secure response with every tap and has a wire that detects tampering attempts," she explains.

The second version of the chip also works on metal and can be scanned through glass, so it now covers jewellery, trophies and perfume bottles too. The showcase is reserved for famous names for now: all 18 champions' crowns of ATHLOS, the women's athletics competition founded by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, will carry a Veritas chip. There's also one in a pair of LeBron James's first Nike sneakers, reworked by artist Adam Port. One tap of the phone and the sneakers' whole story opens up.

The money is modest: 1.75 million dollars (around 1.5 million euros) in the earliest funding round, led by Ohanian's fund Seven Seven Six. So the Reddit co-founder is at the same time an investor in Veritas and the founder of the competition whose crowns carry its chip. The partnership is, to put it mildly, an in-house affair. DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang and several other investors also took part in the round.

The chip isn't just a lock against copies. It opens another direct channel for brands to the buyer: an app, clubs, event sign-ups and early access to new collections for a select few. Luxury stopped selling just an object long ago; it also sells the feeling of being among the few. That leaves the question of whether anyone at our markets would check a chip before buying the bag.