Mansoor Ahmed-Rengers

Dr. Mansoor Ahmed-Rengers is a British-Pakistani cryptographer and entrepreneur who has dedicated his career to building trust infrastructure for the digital world. He completed his PhD under Professor Ross Anderson at the University of Cambridge's Computer Science department, specialising in security engineering and the application of blockchain technology to combat synthetic media. He subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at Cambridge and earlier earned a Master's degree under the supervision of leading cryptographers at ETH Zurich, where he focused on privacy and distributed systems security.

Ahmed-Rengers founded OpenOrigins out of a realisation that deepfake detection was a losing arms race — each advance in AI-generated content would inevitably outpace detection tools. Instead, he developed a purpose-built blockchain that proves the human provenance of digital media at the moment of capture, providing an immutable, decentralised record of authenticity. He holds multiple patents in cybersecurity and blockchain technology, all of which underpin the OpenOrigins platform. He has also advised government ministries on AI-generated content policy and is a visiting researcher at the Centre for ReDecentralisation (CRDC) at Cambridge.

OpenOrigins has become the content provenance partner of choice for major media organisations, including ITN — the UK's leading news production company — which uses the platform to secure its entire archive of over one million video clips. Following a $4.5 million seed round led by Galaxy Interactive in 2024, with participation from Unbound, the company is expanding globally into the US and India and has launched an AI licensing marketplace, helping newsrooms monetise their verified, human-created content in the age of AI training data.