On March 21, 2018, the accelerator RebelBio published a two-minute pitch video filmed at Imperial College London: "A Cashless Future: It's Within Our Grasp." It's the closest thing the archive has to a birth announcement for VivoKey Technologies, the company I founded in 2017 to work on the problem my first dozen years of implants couldn't touch: identity.
The chips I'd carried since 2005 are identifiers: they repeat a serial number or hold a scrap of data, which is plenty for a door and useless for proving anything. By 2016 I was showing Motherboard a garage prototype built around in-body encryption. Founding VivoKey was the decision to turn that idea into a real platform. The video describes a subdermal identity device that "marries the robust data protection of cryptography with the convenience of biometric systems": no battery, no charging, NFC compliant, working with a mobile app to perform authorizations and identity validations.
VivoKey joined Class V of RebelBio, SOSV's life-sciences accelerator: ten startups, a twelve-week program in London based at the Imperial White City Incubator, up to $250,000 of investment attached, and a demo day at the end of March 2018. SOSV's cohort announcement summarized us as "Your unforgettable digital identity solution."
The first product followed the same year. In 2018 VivoKey developed the first commercially available cryptographically secure human-implantable NFC transponders; that original injectable, the Spark, was retired in 2019 in favor of the AES-based Spark 2. The identity platform (authentication, digital signatures, and eventually payment) has been the long project ever since.