Persona Expands Identity Research to Help Keep the Internet Human

New Persona Research Grant offers academic researchers $100,000 to advance the study of accessible identity, fraud and privacy

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Persona, the global identity platform, has helped shape the industry’s response to emerging threats to online identity, from bot impersonation, AI-powered fraud and identity theft, publishing proprietary data and research that inform trust and safety teams, academics and policymakers. Today, Persona is taking those efforts a step further, introducing the Persona Research Grant program, an open call for academic research that will strengthen how identity is verified, protected and trusted online.

The program expands on grants Persona previously awarded to researchers at three U.S. universities, and on its in-house research team’s work, which was accepted at computer vision’s premier conference.

Establishing who is real online has never been more difficult, or more consequential. The financial toll alone is significant: Americans reported losing a record $15.9 billion to fraud in 2025, according to the Federal Trade Commission, up 27% in a single year and nearly five times what they lost in 2020. The FBI's Internet Crime Report puts cybercrime losses even higher, at $20.9 billion.

AI and bots are accelerating the problem. Generative tools let bad actors clone faces and voices, impersonate real people and trusted brands, and run attacks at a massive scale. People are left questioning whether the comments they read, the videos they watch, and the reviews they rely on are authentic. The scale of automated activity adds to that uncertainty: according to Thales’ 2026 Bad Bot Report, automated traffic now makes up 53% of all internet activity. As impersonation becomes easier to scale and harder to detect, open, rigorous research is essential to understanding how these attacks evolve and developing effective protections.

"The world is pouring unprecedented investment into making AI more capable, but far less into the other side of the equation: proving there's a real person behind the screen, protecting their privacy and making sure everyone can participate online," said Charles Yeh, co-founder and chief technology officer of Persona. “This year alone, our research has mapped how selfie fraud actually happens, earned recognition at the field's top venues and helped power Persona Relay, which lets people prove they're human without revealing who they are. Through our grant program, we're bringing more researchers into that work, because keeping the internet human is too important for any one company to take on alone.”

Persona’s Research Grant program offers researchers more than funding. Grant recipients collaborate with a team that builds identity systems used in the real world, and Persona supports publishing the results so the whole field can build on them.

Program details:

• What it funds: Academic research that advances digital identity, privacy and fraud prevention
• Focus areas: Data privacy, fraud intelligence and accessible identity
• Award: Up to $100,000 per project, for projects lasting up to 12 months
• Who can apply: Full-time faculty and researchers at universities and degree-granting research institutions
• Number of awards: Unlimited; all qualifying proposals will be considered
• Timing: Applications are accepted on a rolling basis
• How to apply: Submit proposals to [e-mail] or visit withpersona.com/research/persona-research-grants to learn more

To date, Persona’s research practice has partnered with leading universities, including the University at Buffalo to build a taxonomy and benchmark for selfie fraud, and collaborations with the University of Connecticut on privacy-preserving cryptography research: “Oblivious Single Access Machines Are Concretely Efficient” and “Updatable Oblivious Key Value Stores With Access Control and Application to Multi Key Searchable Encryption.” Persona is currently working with the University of North Carolina on detecting fraud in selfie videos.

Two Persona research papers were accepted to the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026, or CVPR, the field’s premier computer vision conference. “From Measurement to Mitigation: Quantifying and Reducing Identity Leakage in Image Representation Encoders with Linear Subspace Removal” earned a spot in the main conference.

To explore the latest from Persona’s research team, visit research.withpersona.com. Learn more about the grant program, visit withpersona.com/research/persona-research-grants

About Persona

Persona is an identity platform that gives organizations the building blocks to securely collect, verify, manage and act on information about individuals and businesses. Persona combines identity verification, fraud prevention, orchestration and identity operations in a unified platform designed to help organizations adapt their identity programs as risks, regulations and use cases change. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, Persona serves organizations across industries, including fintech, marketplaces, AI platforms, workforce, retail, and more, with global identity capabilities available across more than 200 countries and territories.