In the aftermath of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, one thing became painfully clear: online disinformation was spreading at an alarming rate, shaping Americans’ perceptions of candidates and key issues like public health, climate change, and immigration. As generative AI continues to advance, producing deepfakes and questionable “facts” with ease, the threat of misinformation is only set to grow.
Enter Factiverse, a Norwegian startup determined to combat this scourge. The company, which recently won Best Pitch in the Security, Privacy, and Social Networking category at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield 200, has developed a B2B tool that provides live fact-checking of text, video, and audio content.
“We’re not an LLM (large language model). We’ve built a different type of model based on information retrieval,” explains Factiverse CEO and co-founder Maria Amelie, a former technology journalist and published author who has firsthand experience in the war against misinformation.
Factiverse’s model is trained on high-quality, well-curated data from reliable sources and fact-checkers around the world, rather than the “junk food data” that often underlies generative AI. This allows the system to “intuitively think like someone who has a lot of experience with researching information,” as Amelie puts it.
The model, which leverages machine learning and natural language processing, can identify claims and scour the web in real-time – from search engines to academic papers – to determine the credibility of the sources. Crucially, it doesn’t just regurgitate the first results that pop up, but actively assesses the domain and the credibility of the quoted sources.
Factiverse’s fact-checking prowess was on display during the 2024 U.S. presidential debates, where the company provided live fact-checking that was used by several media partners.
Today, Factiverse claims its system outperforms GPT-4, Mistral 7-b, and GPT-3 in its ability to identify fact-check worthy claims in 114 languages, with a success rate around 80%. The startup is now seeking to raise a seed round in 2025, with the goal of becoming the “fastest” and “best” in the business.
“We are looking for customers and investors who want to invest in trust and credibility,” says Amelie.
