About Julia Social
Julia Social builds digital identity that proves a person is real without learning who they are. The company makes not.bot™, a cryptographic identity people carry on their phones; not.bot™ Verify, the server software businesses run to check that identity inside their own infrastructure; and not.bot™ Signer, a tool for public figures and brands to sign their content so audiences can tell it is genuine. honest.bot™, on the roadmap, extends the same identity to AI agents, so a responsible human stands behind every automated action.
The company started with a question that AI has made urgent: how will anyone know what is real when the internet fills with deepfakes and bots? Answering it means giving people a way to prove they are human, and giving everyone else a way to check, without building one more database of who did what.
The company takes its name from Julia in George Orwell's 1984, the character who holds on to a private life under a regime that watches everything. The name carries the company's first principle: protecting people's privacy starts with protecting it from Julia Social itself.
Why privacy
"Internet infrastructure must not be built around honeypots and gatekeepers." — Ken Griggs, Founder and CEO
A technology becomes infrastructure when it achieves credible neutrality. Cisco's routers move traffic without reading it or holding an opinion about it. Oracle and Postgres store data without knowing what is in it, and on a customer's own servers the database vendor sees none of it. People build on this equipment because they trust it to stay out of the way and out of the data, and that neutrality is what lets one technology become a shared default.
Identity is the hard case. To prove who you are, a system has had to learn who you are and then keep the knowledge, so identity could not stay neutral. The cost shows up in familiar forms: databases that store identities and become targets the moment they exist, and a small set of sign-in providers that users must route through. The arrangement works until attackers breach the database or a provider changes its terms.
Julia Social set out to bring credible neutrality to identity. The company confirms that someone is a real, unique human without learning who they are and without keeping anything that would identify users in case of a breach. Julia Social built the system so it cannot see who uses it, which is why the founders describe their first principle as protecting people's privacy from Julia Social itself.
How blind identity works
Blind identity is hard to build, which is why it is not already the default. Julia Social uses multi-party computation so that no single party, the company included, ever holds enough to reconstruct a person's identity. Identity data stays on the person's own device. Businesses run not.bot Verify inside their own infrastructure, so user data never reaches Julia Social during a check, the way a database vendor sees nothing of what a customer stores on its own servers. The result is identity that behaves like the trusted layers of the internet: useful, current, and blind to the data it carries. The Overview and Privacy Architecture describe the architecture in full.
The team
Founders
Ken Griggs, Founder and CEO. Ken started Julia Social in 2024 after three years building on the Chia blockchain at Chia Network, where he was VP of Customer Success. At Chia he invented DataLayer, a decentralized data system now carried forward as DIG by a separate team, and holds two patents for it. He was the technical lead on the group that convinced the World Bank to choose Chia for the Climate Action Data Trust, the registry that now records more than 95% of the world's carbon-credit projects, and he wrote the whitepaper that made the technical case. He found and disclosed a critical vulnerability in the TibetSwap DeFi exchange before anyone could exploit it. Before Chia, Ken spent seven years in Deloitte's Innovation Lab, where he led development of high-assurance accounting software built to the security and quality bar a Big Four brand demands. Earlier he spent more than a decade in speech recognition at Nexidia, where his work on Nexidia Align contributed to a technical Emmy, and he holds six patents from that work. He also published the first design for a decentralized name service on Chia, the idea behind not.bot's Julia Vanity Names. Ken holds a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and an executive MBA from Emory's Goizueta Business School.
Bill Kesselring, Co-Founder and VP of Business Development. Bill builds and funds companies. He spent a decade as a general partner at GMG Capital Partners, where he helped raise $250 million for early-stage technology companies, and he has founded and led ventures through acquisition, including Kenai Systems, a web-services security company acquired by Forum Systems. Before Julia Social he was Chief Revenue Officer at Tozny, a zero-trust security platform built on cryptography developed with DARPA, NIST, and Galois. That work put him at the center of the problem Julia Social solves: giving organizations strong identity and encryption without asking them to trust a vendor with their data. At Julia Social he leads product direction and go-to-market for not.bot and honest.bot. Bill holds a BS in Business Administration from San Jose State University.
James Hoerr, Co-Founder and Engineering Lead. James builds production systems from zero and ships them. He founded Galactechs, an engineering consultancy behind multiple infrastructure projects, and led engineering at Evergreen Systems, where the team shipped a Chia-powered hardware and cloud platform and brought in more than $5 million in sales. He built and scaled a multi-million-dollar AI datacenter running more than 800 GPUs for production AI workloads. He is a builder in the Chia ecosystem and the creator of Druid Garden and the Chia FastFarmer. At Julia Social he leads engineering, turning the privacy architecture into shipping software across the not.bot app, not.bot Verify, and the did:julia infrastructure.
Partners, advisors, and contributors
Ram Jeyaraman is co-founder and CTO of Datacaliper. He partnered with Julia Social to build not.bot, and his team carried much of the app's development.
Rob Wiltbank, CEO of Galois, advises Julia Social on cryptography and was an early convert to its approach to privacy.
Grant Cermak advised Julia Social from the start and helped shape its earliest decisions.
Santhosh Kumar and Zaina Fathima led development of the not.bot app and have built many kinds of user-facing applications.
Where we're going
Julia Social is building identity as public infrastructure: open where it needs to be trusted, blind where it needs to be safe. not.bot Signer launches first, honest.bot follows, and over time Julia Social decentralizes recovery and opens the credential platform to outside builders. The Roadmap lays out the sequence.