Startup Veritas embeds tamper-resistant chips to verify luxury goods

A founder with experience in product and design has introduced a hardware-first approach intended to make high-end counterfeits harder to pass as genuine. The device is a gem-sized NFC module linked to a digital certificate and a monitoring backend; a simple smartphone tap can reveal whether an item’s provenance matches Veritas’ records. Veritas emphasizes physical tamper-resistance: the chip incorporates a custom coil and a structural bridge that, if disturbed, disables code exposure and prevents straightforward cloning attacks. On the software side the company ties scanning behavior and product metadata into a single platform that brands can use to manage authenticated inventories and customer engagement. The startup also produces blockchain-based digital twins of items to support secondary-market narratives or digital exhibitions, signaling an eye toward both commerce and brand storytelling. Veritas says the module was designed to be inserted with minimal disruption to manufacturing or retrofitted into finished pieces, which lowers the barrier for adoption by maisons and resale channels. The team is early-stage and plans to grow after closing a $1.75 million pre-seed round led by Seven Seven Six; a handful of angel investors from consumer and media sectors participated. The founder frames the problem as an escalating technical contest: conventional visual marks and off-the-shelf NFC tags are increasingly trivial for sophisticated counterfeiters to emulate. By combining device-level protections with backend analytics, Veritas tries to raise the technical cost of successful forgery beyond what many counterfeit operations can sustain. That strategy could change how luxury brands and secondhand platforms verify goods, but effectiveness will depend on integration depth with manufacturers and the willingness of sellers and buyers to adopt an additional verification step. Early partnerships were not disclosed, leaving open questions about retail-scale deployment, unit costs, and the chip’s lifecycle in products subjected to repair or refurbishment. If the product performs as described, it could reduce certain kinds of fraud and give brands new direct channels to interact with authenticated owners; if not, its value will hinge on how resilient the whole stack is against device-level and protocol-level attacks.