Investors

No, and that is deliberate. Age gates check people at the door. Neon Guard is the layer behind the door: continuous, identity-free monitoring that spots when the person using an account no longer matches the age the account claims, and triggers a re-check. Regulators have been clear that inference alone is not a substitute for a robust gate, and we agree. We make the gate you already have actually hold.

Those approaches answer "who is at the door" once. We answer "who is behind the screen" continuously, without collecting identity documents or images. The two are complementary: platforms need both a strong front door and a way of knowing it has not been walked around.

We never collect names, identity documents, faces or message content. The system works on identity-free, session-level signals to monitor potential circumvention and age mismatch. It is designed so it cannot answer any other question about a person. Our approach aligns with the ICO's published position on age inference as an anti-circumvention measure.

Because enforcement arrived. The UK, EU and Australia all now have live age assurance regimes, and Australia's first six months proved that gates alone get circumvented at scale. Every regulator is shifting from asking whether platforms have checks to asking whether the checks are actually effective. The question after that, whether the check still holds throughout the session, is the one we exist to answer.

It would be good for us, and here is why. A device-level check tells you about the account holder, not the person holding the device. Family iPads, borrowed phones, a parent’s laptop, shared school machines: the device attests that its owner is an adult while a child uses it on the sofa. Device signals are another gate, and gates share the same structural limit, which is that they check once and then trust forever. Our layer exists to verify that whatever the gate decided is still true an hour later, so every new gate that rolls out, whether from a platform, a regulator’s app or an operating system, widens the need for it. There is also a legal point: in the UK, the EU and Australia, the compliance duty sits with the platform, not the device maker. A platform cannot hand its liability to Apple. Device-level checks will help, and we would welcome them, but they change where the gate lives, not what happens after it closes.

Neon Guard was founded by Dr Chelsea Jarvie, a former CISO with over twelve years in cybersecurity, built on her PhD research at the University of Strathclyde. She is an international keynote speaker and was named Global Most Inspiring Woman in Cyber 2024.

Email chelsea@neonguard.ai. It comes straight to me.