Created after a devastating experience with online deception, Fuzzy is a new identity verification service designed to keep people safer online.

Online scams are rampant, whether they take place through hiring platforms, social media, email phishing, or dating apps. In fact, online identity fraud is a staggering $75 billion dollar global industry, with $1 billion lost in the U.S. to romance scams alone.

Until now, online identity verification—a method of determining whether a person is who they say they are—has been ineffective, expensive, or slow. Female founders, Kalie Nitzsche and Jaqi Saleem, want to change all that. “After being deceived on the dating apps, I started looking around, and I realized there was no quick, affordable way to validate somebody online,” Nitszche said on a panel at SXSW 2025 as part of Inc. Founders House on International Women’s Day. And so a business idea was born: Fuzzy, an app that uses proprietary artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technology to help protect people from online identity fraud and enables you to monitor and prevent fraudulent use of your own online presence.

As the founder and CEO of the Chicago-based tech company sees it, the need for Fuzzy spans all aspects of modern life. Users may be checking out a new repair person, verifying the identity of an online marketplace seller, looking for a new babysitter, or checking out potential new hires for a small business. “When you think about it from a business-to-business (B2B) perspective, the opportunities are endless,” Nitzsche says. “My dad went from corporate America and became an entrepreneur, running a painting and construction business where he had a ton of 1099 workers. He didn’t necessarily have the time or money to do full background checks, but it would’ve been really nice had he had some quick, affordable tool to verify an individual.”

To bring her vision to life, Nitzsche, formerly a top Adobe sales executive, enlisted the help of leading digital consumer experience (CX) expert Jaqi Saleem, founder and CEO of creative tech agency Qualified Digital. “I needed to find an incredible partner, not only from a technology perspective, but also from an advisory perspective,” Nitzsche says. “Jaqi was my No. 1 choice.”

Filling a gap in the market

The two CEOs explained that when it comes to connecting with people online and meeting new people in real life, the statistics show that it’s a good idea to do background research—and also release any stigma that may be attached to doing so. They knew that helping people get comfortable using their app required an inviting app design.

 “One of the first things I said when Kalie approached us was: ‘We don’t want to be the Norton Antivirus of online detection,’” Saleem says. Nitzsche agreed, adding that, as an end user herself, she wanted Fuzzy to be “very low input for maximum output.” Anyone can spend hours doing online research and find some personal information online, but the time it takes is the real barrier. “I want Fuzzy to be pulling these results into an aggregation in less than five seconds. And I want the results to be accurate,” she explains.

Building it better

Saleem notes that although other companies had attempted to build this type of identity verification in the past, none had been particularly successful, because of the difficulty of the task. But her team at Qualified Digital was able to envision and create the proprietary AI solution to make it happen.

“The value (we offer) is taking technologies and data sources that exist out there, that are disparate and not built for this, and pulling them together,” she says. “With our proprietary AI, there’s a lot more we can do now that people couldn’t do previously.”

Fuzzy’s patent-pending technology, Automated Deception Discovery (ADD), cross-references a profile’s information and images with publicly available data sources. Users enter whatever data points they have, like name, age, and photo, into the app. Within seconds, Fuzzy confirms whether there are any inconsistencies or red flags that the user might want to investigate further.

The app, which is available in beta on the App Store, also enables users to opt to become “Fuzzy-verified” themselves and receive an authenticator-style QR code they can share. Beyond that, Fuzzy enables users to track fraudulent uses of their own images and bios. One research firm estimates that by 2028 one in four new job applicants will be AI-generated fakes. With fraud and deep fakes on the rise, this unique and powerful tool has the potential to revolutionize how people interact and keep themselves safer both online and in real life.

“We could be using this for any online connection that we have,” Nitzsche says. “There are a lot of good humans out there, and we’re trying to let them find each other and connect in a very safe way.”

Link to Inc. Article