Mansoor Ahmed

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Mansoor "Manny" Ahmed is the founder and CEO of OpenOrigins, a London-based provenance startup that uses purpose-built blockchain infrastructure to prove digital photos and videos are real rather than AI-generated. The company partners with newsrooms and content producers, including UK broadcaster ITN, to anchor original media at the point of capture so it can be verified later.

Ahmed started OpenOrigins in 2021 out of his PhD work at the University of Cambridge, where he had built one of the early deepfake detectors before concluding that detection alone is a losing arms race against generative models. His academic background spans authentication systems, distributed systems and trusted computing, with research roles at Cambridge and ETH Zürich, and earlier engineering work at Thales eSecurity and as a blockchain architect at RKVST.

OpenOrigins raised a $4.5 million seed round in late 2024 led by Galaxy, with participation from Galaxy Ventures and existing investor Unbound, taking total funding to roughly $7.25 million. The company has used the capital to expand into the US and India and to launch a marketplace that helps newsrooms license their verified archives for AI training.