Tech
Former Tesla product manager wants to make luxury goods impossible to fake, starting with a chip
The fake goods crisis cuts two ways. Luxury brands lose more than $30 billion a year to counterfeits, while buyers in the booming $210 billion second-hand market have no reliable way to verify that what they’re purchasing is genuine. Veritas wants to solve both problems with a solution that combines custom hardware and software.
The startup claims that it has developed a “hack-proof” chip that can’t be bypassed by devices like Flipper Zero, a widely available hacking tool that can be used to tamper with wireless systems. These chips are linked with digital certificates to verify the authenticity of the products.
Veritas founder Luci Holland has experienced life as both a technologist and an artist. She has worked in different artistic mediums, including mixed media painting and metal sculpture. She has also worked at Tesla as a technical product manager and has held several business development, community growth, and product management roles at tech companies and venture funds.
Holland noted that traditionally, luxury goods makers use various symbols or physical marks to authenticate their products. However, with the growing demand for these goods, counterfeiters have learned to create convincing copies of these marks along with high-quality fake certificates. These goods are often called “superfakes.”
Holland mentioned that she spoke with maisons — established luxury fashion houses — that said some of their locations had to stop authenticating goods because fakes were becoming too convincing to reliably detect. She said that drawing on her experience in both the tech and art worlds, she wanted to solve the problem.
“For me, as someone who has a background in being a designer and then also has experience in tech, I saw this problem and thought about the different ways we could solve it. I think what’s truly innovative is we’ve used and combined elements from both hardware and software to create this solution that helps protect brands in this way to convey the information,” she said.
“When I think of counterfeiting and I think of the most iconic and legacy brands,” she added, “a lot of these brands have been around for over 100, 150 years. These brands deserve the most advanced protection to protect these designs.”
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Veritas worked with different designers to create a chip that is minimally disruptive to the product creation process. The chip is the size of a small gem and can easily be inserted even after a product is made without compromising its integrity. The chip incorporates NFC, or Near Field Communication — the same short-range wireless technology used in contactless payments. This means you can tap your smartphone on the item to verify its authenticity.
Holland said that for security purposes, the startup developed a custom coil and a bridge structure. If someone attempts to tamper with the product, the chip goes dormant and hides the codes related to the product. On the software side, the product information is linked to the Veritas back end, which monitors scanning behavior to prevent fraud. The company also creates a blockchain-based digital clone of the product for possible digital art gallery shows or metaverse activities.
The company didn’t reveal who it is working with, but said that brands can use its software suite to get information about all the chipped products, add team members to manage items, and add product information along with the product story — details that can also be used to connect with their community. The startup said that some partners use this to engage customers through exclusive invitations or early access to new products.
While the counterfeiting market is big, Holland thinks the market still needs education around why it needs robust tech solutions.
“It is shocking to see that some of the shelf solutions, like NFC chips that brands are using, are actually so vulnerable and could easily be bypassed. This is the one thing most people don’t know, and we want to educate the ecosystem to adopt safer solutions,” Holland said.
Veritas said that it raised $1.75 million in pre-seed funding led by Seven Seven Six, along with DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang, skincare brand Reys’ co-founder Gloria Zhu, and former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine. The company plans to use the funding to expand its two-person team.
Seven Seven Six’s Alexis Ohanian said that he was impressed by the combination of design taste and technology expertise of Holland. He thinks that brands know that fake goods are a problem and are constantly looking for robust solutions.
“It’s absolutely an arms race [against fake goods makers], but we’re used to fighting those and consistently winning in tech — and luxury brands need all the help they can get,” Ohanian said.
Tech
Primary Ventures raises healthy $625M Fund V to focus on seed investing
Primary Ventures has closed a $625 million Fund V focused on seed investing nationwide, which is a sizable fund for a firm that focuses solely on early-stage investing. It perhaps showcases how the size of early-stage rounds has dramatically increased in the age of AI.
Ben Sun, a co-founder and general partner at Primary Ventures, told TechCrunch the average check size for this fund will range from $5 million to $10 million, and he hopes the firm will invest in 40 to 50 companies over the course of three years. He said the fund will also go as early as pre-seed.
The fund will also continue to spread its investments nationwide. Primary is one of New York’s most well-known venture firms, and at one point, most of its investments were focused in the Big Apple. Sun said the location thesis has changed.
The firm, which overall focuses on early-stage investing, has now done deals in Chicago, Seattle, Virginia, and D.C. “The talent, the founder, and the startups are happening everywhere,” he said. “The potential outcomes are so much bigger than they’ve ever been.”
He sees seed investing as headed toward its own asset class, especially as the quality of talent and their startups continue to rise, paired with tech’s current transformation. Firms are competing, after all, to find the hottest deals. “I think [a fund of this size] allows you to go in and compete and bring more resources to the table to work with the best founders and opportunities.”
Sequoia also recently raised a $200 million seed fund, as did Uncork Capital, which announced a $225 million seed fund earlier last year.
Though Primary calls itself a generalist, Sun said the firm has sector specialists, each with their own focus. He likes consumer, but also has investors focused on vertical AI, fintech, healthcare, enterprise, cybersecurity, and infrastructure. “We pretty much cover probably 80% or 90% of the seed sector activities out there.”
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Fund V has already invested in three companies. Primary previously raised $60 million in Fund I when it launched in 2015, followed by $100 million in Fund II and $150 million in Fund III.
It raised a $275 million fund and an additional $163 million for an opportunity fund. Some of its investments include the AI chip company Etched, the risk management platform Alloy, the women’s networking hub Chief, and the AI marketplace Dandelion Health. It has $1.65 billion in assets under management.
Tech
Spotify hits a record 751M monthly users thanks to Wrapped, new free features
Swedish music streaming giant Spotify saw its user numbers peak last quarter, driven by its year-end “Wrapped” campaign, which rounds up stats and listening highlights for users and new features on its free tier.
The company said it saw a record 38 million new users in the fourth quarter, taking its total to 751 million monthly active users, up 11% from a year earlier. Paying subscribers increased by 10% to 290 million in the quarter.
Spotify said the “Wrapped” campaign resulted in more than 300 million engaged users and 630 million shares on social media in 56 languages.
Revenue came in at €4.53 billion ($5.39 billion), about 7% more than a year earlier, thanks to an 8% increase in subscription revenue. However, the company’s ad-supported business saw revenue dip by 4% to €518 million ($616.6 million). Gross margin, an important metric investors watch for indications of improvements to Spotify’s profitability, improved by 83 basis points to a record high of 33.1% as the company sold more ads for podcasts and music.
The solid performance comes as Spotify’s new co-CEOs Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström take the reins from co-founder Daniel Ek, and they will now oversee a business that has far outgrown what it initially set out to do.
After launching as a music-streaming pure-play, Spotify has expanded its remit to include podcasts, audiobooks, and even physical bookstores. It’s launched music videos within the app as well as video podcasts and has doubled down on its retention strategy by adding social features like group chats and letting users share what they’re listening to. You can even use Spotify to book tickets to concerts, or explore the story behind songs.
The company has also added AI features like an AI DJ and AI-generated playlists, and now lets users exclude tracks from being recommended to help them better tailor what they listen to.
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Profitability has been a big focus for Spotify in recent years, and the company has tried to achieve that by increasing subscription prices in the U.S. and Europe. It’s also added new features to its free, ad-supported tier to attract more people away from rivals like YouTube Music and Amazon Music, letting users search for and choose songs they want to listen to.
The company expects to reach 759 million users and 293 million paying subscribers in the current quarter.
Tech
Former GitHub CEO raises record $60M dev tool seed round at $300M valuation
Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke has raised the largest-ever seed round for a dev tool startup, according to its lead backer, Felicis. The startup, Entire, has raised $60 million at a $300 million valuation.
Entire offers an open source tool to help developers better manage code written by AI agents.
Entire’s tech has three components. One is a Git-compatible database to unify the AI-produced code. Git is a distributed version control system popular with enterprises and used by open source sites like GitHub and GitLab.
Another component is what it calls “a universal semantic reasoning layer” intended to allow multiple AI agents to work together. The final piece is an AI-native user interface designed with agent-to-human collaboration in mind.
The first product Entire is releasing is an open source tool it calls Checkpoints that automatically pairs every bit of software the agent submits for use in a software project with the context that created it, including prompts and transcripts. The idea is to allow the human developer to review, search, and perhaps even learn from why the AI did what it did.
Entire hopes to help developers better deal with the large volumes of software created by AI coding agents. Popular open source projects are particularly overwhelmed these days with suggested code contributions that may or may not be AI slop — meaning poorly designed and possibly unusable code.
Dohmke explains in the press release: “We are living through an agent boom, and now massive volumes of code are being generated faster than any human could reasonably understand. The truth is, our manual system of software production — from issues, to git repositories, to pull requests, to deployment — was never designed for the era of AI in the first place.”
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Dohmke was CEO of Microsoft’s GitHub for four years, leaving in August 2025 to found a startup, he said in a post on X at the time. During his time there, he oversaw the rise of the popular coding agent GitHub Copilot.
Other investors in the seed round include Madrona, M12, Basis Set, Harry Stebbings, Jerry Yang, and Datadog founder and CEO Olivier Pomel.
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