VerifyU × Burke Products · Stolen Valor

This was the arm of VerifyU we built to fight stolen valor and identity fraud across the U.S. military. Together with Burke Products, an exclusive licensor of Datavault AI technology under a U.S. sole-source government contract, we positioned VerifyU as a patented AI framework for instant authentication of identities, service records, and credentials, with experiential Valor tokens minted on-chain to connect service members to benefits, associations, and partner programs.

Burke Products is a genuinely great company. Aaron Bahkshi has 55 years of contracting and supplying aerospace and combat technologies for the U.S. Army, Air Force, Space Force, Marines, and Navy, and the partnership opened doors into defense and government channels that almost no one else has. The exclusivity of their sole-source position, only awarded when no other supplier exists, gave VerifyU a defensible lane in a market projected to surpass $50 billion by 2030.

Honestly, I didn't fully agree with the angle we took here. Pinning VerifyU's first major defense moment to the stolen valor narrative felt like a bit of a stretch given how far the underlying problem reaches. But it was a hugely ambitious goal, and seeing something I helped create get used to stand with veterans, protecting the integrity of their service and the value of credentials they earned, is genuinely incredible. That part outweighs the framing.

Underneath the campaign sat real IP, including Datavault's patents for inaudible tones tracking (U.S. 11,195,362 and 11,315,150) for secure data authentication, the tokenized minting authentication patent for blockchain-based verification, and U.S. 11,593,515 for real-time credential management. It's the same stack I sold into education and athletics, now pointed at defense.