Voice as an authentication key, from idea to funded startup
VOiceMe, the first startup to come out of the AI-focused studio. Validation, product design and prototype of a system using voice as a second factor for access, payments and legally binding signatures. First round of €560,000 in 2021.
- My roleSenior Innovation & AI Product Manager at the studio — validation, product design, prototype
- Duration2021, validation and prototype stage
- AreasVoice recognition · Two-factor authentication · Digital signature · Validation · Prototyping
An AI-focused startup studio does not fund other people’s ideas: it builds them in-house, one after another, on tight timelines and budgets. As product lead for the studio, my job was to take each initiative from concept to something demonstrable — or stop it in time. This was the first one to come out of the studio, which made it the one the whole model’s credibility rested on.
Two-factor authentication works, but it is friction: passwords to remember, SMS codes, steps that make people abandon a payment halfway through. Voice looks like the obvious answer. The real problem, though, was not technical: it was whether people would trust their own voice to authorise a payment or sign a legally binding document. Recognition that works in a lab but that nobody will accept for signing a contract is a dead product.
- 01
Explore
Opportunity analysis inside the studio: where authentication friction actually costs money — service access, payments, signature — and which of those areas have a regulatory framework that lets a signature carry legal weight.
- 02
Understand
Validating the idea before building it: verifying the problem with potential users, competitor analysis, business model definition, and setting the conditions under which the initiative was worth continuing.
- 03
Design and build
Product design and prototype: how you enrol your voice, what happens when recognition fails, how you tell someone they are authorising a payment with their voice without making them feel exposed.
- Validated product and working prototype: voice as a second authentication factor for service access, payments and legally binding signatures.
- The first startup to come out of the studio, incorporated as a standalone company: VOiceMe.
- First round closed in 2021: €560,000, subscribed by more than forty Italian and international investors.
- It went on beyond my involvement: around €925,000 raised in total and a €5.5M pre-money valuation at the last converted round, in 2024.
- In the same period I helped formalise the studio’s repeatable process for taking a startup from ideation to exit: stages, gate criteria, and the points where you explicitly decide whether to continue or stop.
This applies to any initiative where the technology works but adoption is the real unknown — which, with AI, is almost always. The first question is not “can we build it”, but “will anyone accept using it for something that matters”. Answering that costs a few weeks. Finding out after you have built it costs the project.
The client is not named, for confidentiality. Sector and scale are real, as is everything else here.
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