We prove you're human
without knowing who you are
Cognau is a human identifier. It answers one question, at the moment it matters: is there a real, living person taking part in this session?
Why we exist
Almost every trust decision made online rests on an assumption nobody checks: that there is a person on the other end. Account opening, high-value transfers, account recovery, remote hiring, age-restricted access. All of them were designed in a period when producing a convincing human face in real time was hard enough to ignore.
That period is over, and the industry built to handle it is pointed at a different problem. Identity verification asks whether a document is genuine and whether a face matches it. Both are useful. Neither establishes that the face belongs to someone actually present, which is precisely the gap synthetic media walks through.
Cognau exists to close that gap and to do it without becoming another place where people's faces accumulate. Our position is that proving presence should not require building a permanent record of the person who proved it. The verdict is what has value to our customers. The footage is a liability, and we treat it as one.
The problem we work on
Three shifts turned a rare, expensive attack into an ordinary one.
Convincing fakes are cheap now
Rendering a persuasive face in real time used to take a studio. It now takes consumer hardware and a short reference clip, which moves face fraud out of the hands of specialists.
A camera feed proves nothing
Anything a browser can show can be synthesised or replayed. A video stream is an assertion about reality, not evidence of it, and most onboarding flows still treat the two as the same thing.
Documents answer the wrong question
Traditional identity checks confirm that a document is genuine and matches a face. They were never designed to establish that the face is attached to a living person taking part right now.
How our approach differs
Detecting a fake after the fact is a losing race. We change what the attacker has to produce.
The session asks, it does not just watch
Passive observation of a video stream is the easiest thing to defeat, because the attacker controls every pixel. A Cognau session sets short prompts and checks how the person responds to them, so passing requires reacting correctly in the moment rather than looking correct.
Decided where the attacker is not
Nothing that matters is decided in the browser. Analysis runs server-side and the authoritative result is delivered to your backend, so a tampered page cannot manufacture an outcome for you to trust.
An outcome, with a confidence score
A session returns passed or not passed, along with a confidence score you can threshold to fit your own risk appetite. Sitting before or alongside your existing checks, it removes the question they were never built to answer.
Ephemeral by design
A verification platform that hoards video becomes the breach everyone was trying to avoid. We keep the outcome, and as little of the evidence behind it as the job allows.
Deletion is the default
Nothing is kept because it might be useful later. Session material is written only where a step in the check has to read it back, and everything that is written carries a deletion deadline from the moment it exists.
An unfinished check leaves nothing
If somebody abandons a check, or it times out, or it is never scored, everything captured is deleted within a day. It backs no decision, nobody will look at it, and every hour it survived would be liability bought for nothing.
A completed check keeps a sample
A finished check keeps a few still images per prompt rather than the hundreds captured, because those few are the evidence behind a result somebody acted on. They expire on a published schedule, and you set the schedule for identity documents yourself.
Retention schedules and deletion rights are set out in full in our biometric data policy.
What we hold to
We do not need to know who you are
Establishing that a person is present is a different question from establishing which person. We answer the first one, and we do not require the second to do it.
The default is deletion
Retention is something a customer opts into for a stated reason, not the resting state of the system. Anything we do keep has a published schedule attached to it.
A check, never a character judgement
A session that does not pass means the check did not pass: poor lighting and a bad connection can do that. We report the outcome of a check and never label a person as anything.
No claim we cannot show you
You get the confidence score behind an outcome and a record of the session, so a decision can be reviewed and appealed rather than taken on trust.
The company
Cognau is a product of Altailab. We are a small engineering team, and we build one thing rather than a suite, because the human presence problem is deep enough to deserve full attention.
We would rather be judged on how the product behaves than on how it is described, so the technical documentation is public and readable before you talk to anyone, and a sandbox is available without a contract.
If you are weighing this up for your own platform, we are glad to be asked hard questions about it. Reach us at [email protected].
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