In Episode 3, we chat with Ori Eisen, founder of Trusona and a seasoned cybersecurity veteran. With over two decades in fraud prevention, Eisen brings deep experience to a problem that has only grown harder to solve: knowing who, or what, is truly on the other end of a transaction.
Beyond Passwords—Verifying Identity in the Age of AI
Eisen spent years on the front lines of fraud prevention—running worldwide fraud operations at American Express, then VeriSign and Network Solutions—before founding 41st Parameter, a fraud prevention and device fingerprinting company backed by Kleiner Perkins and acquired by Experian in 2013. That career gave him an unusually clear view of a persistent industry failure: that passwords and knowledge-based authentication were never real proof of identity, just convenient proxies for it.
The problem has only compounded with generative AI. Synthetic identities can now apply for financial aid, change a vendor’s bank account, or redeem airline miles while appearing entirely legitimate. The MGM breach—where attackers compromised an entire company through a single IT help desk call—is a clear example of the gap Trusona was built to address.
A newer frontier is AI agents. As autonomous agents gain access to financial accounts and enterprise workflows, the question of who authorized a given action becomes critical. Eisen sees a future where invoking an agent requires its own identity verification step—the human authenticates, and that credential is passed to the agent acting on their behalf. Without that chain of trust, liability exposure grows for everyone from credit card companies to enterprise security teams.
Eisen founded Trusona to solve this at the verification layer. The company’s ATO Protect platform helps organizations confirm in real time that the person—or agent—behind a request is who they claim to be, with deepfake-resistant identity proofing designed for IT service desks, HR onboarding, financial transactions, healthcare, and increasingly, the authentication of AI agents acting on behalf of humans.
The Innovator Series is meant to get inside the mind of the founder, and learn what inspired and motivated them to find success in the cybersecurity industry. Learn more about Ori Eisen and Trusona in our 11-minute conversation on YouTube.