Persona has launched a new research grant program for academic institutions and researchers, offering up to $100,000 per project to support work in digital identity, data privacy, fraud intelligence, and accessible identity verification. The company said the effort is intended to encourage more fraud-focused research and help identify whether a real human is operating behind a computer screen.
Fraud and cybercrime losses are climbing in the US
According to data cited from the US Federal Trade Commission, Americans lost $15.9 billion to fraud in 2025. That was up 27% from a year earlier and nearly five times the amount recorded in 2020.
Persona also cited the FBI’s Internet Crime Report, which estimated losses from cybercrime at $20.9 billion. Separately, Thales’ 2026 Imperva Bad Bot Report said automated traffic accounted for 53% of all internet activity, meaning more than half of traffic did not come from humans.
Persona says more academic participation is needed
Charles Yeh, Persona’s co-founder and CTO, said the world has sharply increased investment in artificial intelligence, but has spent comparatively less on proving that a real person is behind a screen, protecting user privacy, and making sure everyone can participate in online activity.
Yeh said keeping the internet safe is not something Persona can do alone, and said the grant program is meant to bring more academic researchers into the field.
Up to $100,000 per project with no cap on the number of awards
The program is open to full-time faculty members and researchers at universities and research institutions. Each project can receive as much as $100,000 in funding, with a maximum project term of 12 months. Persona said there is no set cap on the number of grants, and all eligible proposals will be considered.
Recipients will work with Persona’s team building physical identity systems, and the company said it will support public publication of the research results. Application details are available through the Persona Research Grants page.
Previous work with US universities
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, Persona provides an identity platform that combines identity verification, fraud prevention, and workflow orchestration. Its services cover industries including fintech, marketplaces, AI platforms, workforce, and retail, and its global identity verification capability spans more than 200 countries and territories.
The company said it has already worked with several universities in the United States, including research on selfie fraud classification benchmarks with the University at Buffalo, privacy-preserving cryptography with the University of Connecticut, and selfie video fraud detection with the University of North Carolina.
Persona also said two of its research papers were accepted this year by the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. One of them, "From Measurement to Mitigation: Leveraging Linear Subspaces to Remove Quantization and Reduce Identity Leakage in Image Representation Encoders," was selected as a thematic highlight.