Observed Signal · Oct 16, 2026 · Product Update · Source: techcrunch · Impact: 2/5 · Sentiment: Positive
Veritas Expands Anti-Counterfeit Chip to Jewelry, Trophies, Fragrance Bottles
Veritas, a startup founded by former Tesla technical product manager Luci Holland, has introduced the second generation of its anti-counterfeit chip. The new chip works on metal surfaces and can be scanned through glass, expanding its use to jewelry, trophies, hard-surface products, and fragrance bottles. The chip generates a secure response with each tap and includes a tamper-detection wire, making it harder to counterfeit than QR codes or static NFC tags. Veritas announced a partnership with ATHLOS, a women's track-and-field competition founded by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, to embed chips in championship crowns. The company has raised $1.75 million in pre-seed funding led by Seven Seven Six, with participation from Stanley Tang, Gloria Zhu, and Josh Constine. Veritas also showcased a chip embedded in a pair of LeBron James' first Nike shoes.
Veritas introduces a next-gen anti-counterfeit chip expanding to new product categories, which is relevant to brand protection in luxury goods and potentially to AdTech through authentication, but it is a niche startup story with limited direct impact on the advertising ecosystem.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Veritas introduced the second version of its anti-counterfeit chip, which works on metal surfaces and can be scanned through glass.
- The chip is designed for jewelry, trophies, hard-surface products, and glass objects such as fragrance bottles.
- Veritas partnered with ATHLOS, a women's track-and-field competition founded by Alexis Ohanian, to embed chips in championship crowns.
- Veritas has raised $1.75 million in pre-seed funding led by Seven Seven Six.
- Veritas embedded a chip into a pair of LeBron James' first Nike shoes.
Connected Companies & Entities
2 Entities mapped“Veritas was founded by Luci Holland, a former Tesla technical product manager”
“The company also embedded a chip into a pair of LeBron James' first Nike shoes”
Ontology Mapping & Concepts
Related Market Signals & Shifts
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Etched Hits $5B Valuation, $1B in AI Chip Orders
Etched, an AI chip startup founded in 2022 and positioned as a competitor to Nvidia, said TSMC successfully manufactured its chip earlier in 2026 and the company has booked $1 billion in contract orders for full systems powered by that chip. Etched calls the systems "frontier inference clusters" and is currently testing the first product with customers. The startup has raised $800 million to date, including an unannounced $500 million tranche closed in December at a $5 billion post-money valuation. Notable investors include VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma and Ribbit Capital; angel backers named include Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li. The announcement comes amid heightened investor interest in inference-accelerating chip technology from other players such as Cerebras, Groq, hyperscalers and OpenAI/Broadcom.
World scales human verification; first integration with Tinder
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Cognichip Raises $60M to Use AI to Design Chips
Cognichip is developing a deep-learning system to assist engineers in designing semiconductor chips, aiming to shorten multi-year design cycles and reduce development costs. The startup, which emerged from stealth in 2025, said it raised $60 million in a new funding round led by Seligman Ventures; Intel CEO Lip‑Bu Tan participated and will join Cognichip’s board, and Umesh Padval (Seligman) will also join the board. Cognichip says its advantage is a domain-specific model trained on chip‑design data (including synthetic and licensed datasets) and secure procedures to let partners train on proprietary data. The company claims it can cut chip development costs by >75% and timelines by >50% but has not yet produced a chip designed end-to-end by its system and did not name customers. It has demoed the model with students using the open RISC‑V architecture and competes with incumbents like Synopsys and Cadence and startups such as ChipAgents and Ricursive.
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