Self Labs, a zero-knowledge (ZK) identity and proof-of-humanity provider, has raised $9 million in seed funding to scale its privacy-preserving verification infrastructure.
The round was backed by European crypto investment firm Greenfield Capital, Startup Capital Ventures x SBI Fund (an early-stage VC fund), and several prominent Web3 leaders, including Sandeep Nailwal of Polygon, EigenLayer’s Sreeram Kannan, Stake Capital’s Julien Bouteloup, Slow Ventures’ Jill Carlson, and Across Protocol’s Hart Lambur.
Self allows users to verify their humanity and unique identity using biometric passports from 129 countries, ID cards from 35 nations, and India’s Aadhaar system, which covers more than 1.4 billion people.
The company plans to expand its coverage to include African markets like Nigeria and Uganda, extending support for additional national identity systems.
According to CEO and Co-Founder Eric Nakagawa, the company’s mission centers on “secure, privacy-preserving humanity and identity verification,” which he said is increasingly vital as Web3 platforms seek sybil resistance and OFAC compliance.
Self’s infrastructure has already attracted major partners, including Google Cloud, Aave, and Velodrome. The collaborations enable use cases such as sybil-resistant token distributions, privacy-focused age verification, and sanctions-compliant user access—all without exposing personal data. The ZK-based framework ensures that biometric or identity information remains entirely under user control, inaccessible even to Self.
Alongside the funding, Self introduced a new points-driven rewards program for its app. Users can earn points by creating a Self Pass and verifying their humanity across partner ecosystems. These points accumulate as users confirm eligibility for Aave or Velodrome pools, age gates for Lemonade events, or upcoming Google Cloud-integrated AI search tools and faucet programs.
The program aims to gamify engagement while providing insight into usage patterns that could shape future incentives. As decentralized identity adoption accelerates, Self’s technology sits at the convergence of privacy, regulation, and human verification—an area many see as critical to the internet’s next stage.
By blending biometric authentication, cryptographic privacy, and interoperability with global IDs, Self Labs is positioning itself as a core infrastructure provider for the human layer of Web3.
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