Protect
A wearable MVP built and in active testing, with anti-surveillance frames in development.
Investors
Building the foundational category.
We're building the foundational category of Personal Biometric Privacy: the physical and digital layer that gives people back agency over when their biometric identity is captured by consumer AI devices.
Who you are should be introduced, not extracted.
The opportunity
Consumer AI hardware is scaling faster than almost any category in technology, and nothing today protects the person on the other side of the camera.
€8.1B
Estimated total addressable market for consumer biometric privacy products across the US and EU.
€2.5B
Serviceable addressable market within CloakDots' initial focus segments. Internal calculations.
70–90M
People across the US and EU who already pay for privacy tools today: the adjacent, proven willingness to pay that this category extends.
167%
Year-over-year growth in display-less smart glasses shipments, Q1 2026 alone.
41.9%
Forecast CAGR through 2030 for display-based smart glasses, the fastest-growing segment in consumer XR.
According to our calculations, the total addressable market across the US and EU is €8.1B — based on 70–90M privacy-active consumers spending roughly €100 per year, in line with existing identity-protection subscription pricing.
Smart glasses growth: IDC, “Smart Glasses Surge: The XR Market Is Rewriting Its Own Rules”, June 2026.
Why now
Every wave of consumer hardware has created its own protection layer, once the wave was big enough to need one.
-
01
PCs
AntivirusNorton, McAfee. A multi-billion-dollar category.
-
02
The open web
Ad blockers and spam filtersNow default behaviour.
-
03
Public networks
VPNsRoughly 1.5 billion users today.
-
04
Account sprawl
Password managers1Password, Bitwarden.
-
05
Data brokers
Identity protectionAura, roughly €2.5B.
-
06
AI wearables
Personal Biometric PrivacyUnclaimed.
The sixth wave is physical, not software, which is exactly why the incumbents best placed to respond to the first five haven't built this, and why the platforms shipping the cameras structurally can't.
The problem, in brief
Your face is a persistent identifier, yet you do not control every camera that can capture it. AI glasses intensify this imbalance by embedding hands-free cameras and AI into ordinary eyewear.
Meta says millions of people now use its AI glasses daily, while France's data protection authority warns that bystanders may be recorded without fully realising it; 67% of French adults surveyed in 2026 said these devices pose a privacy risk. Current safeguards, such as recording indicators and wearer-controlled settings, may provide notice, but they do not give the person being captured a way to grant, refuse or withdraw permission.
Once captured, facial images can be processed into biometric identifiers that cannot be reset like a password. Regulation is responding, but the fundamental gap remains: individuals lack a practical, real-time mechanism to control when and how their biometric identity is collected and used.
Full sourcing and citations: see the Evidence page.
What we're building
| Product | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Detect | A free companion app that tells you when an AI-enabled device is nearby. | In development |
| Protect | A wearable product suite featuring products that actively interfere with infrared and depth-sensing capture. | MVP, in active testing |
| Disrupt | Material technology that passively reduces biometric readability. | In development |
Where we are today
Detect
An app in development, ETA September 2026.
Disrupt
New material innovations in the research phase; production and design in development.
- Patent-pending on our core material and device approach.
- A thirteen-source, peer-reviewed and government-sourced evidence base underpinning the category.
- Personal Biometric Privacy and Consumer Privacy Engineering defined and in consistent use across our materials.
- Survey launched to validate demand, product/price/market fit, and to recruit candidates for one-to-one interviews.
The team
CloakDots is founded and led by Donna Darthuizen, a senior European consumer digital-commerce executive with two decades of experience shaping digital retail commerce, consumer innovation and large-scale commercial businesses. Her leadership career includes senior roles at Zalando and OTTO GmbH, two of Europe's most influential technology-driven consumer platforms, where she operated at significant international scale.
She is backed by a founding team assembled around the capabilities required to turn an ambitious privacy technology into a global product: advanced AI and machine-learning research, hardware and embedded engineering, product development from concept through pre-market release, and commercial execution across some of the world's most powerful technology and consumer platforms.
This is not a team learning how to build technology or enter global markets. On the commercial side, it is a team that has already built, scaled and commercialised technology used by millions of people. On the technical side, it is a team with published, peer-reviewed research and real hardware taken from concept to pre-market.
That combination of deep technical capability, real-world product engineering and international commercial experience is the foundation on which CloakDots is building the next layer of personal biometric privacy.
Full team detail: see the About page. An advisory board is also being formed; details to follow.
The investment case
Three factors define why Personal Biometric Privacy is investable now.
Category timing
Every prior wave of consumer technology has produced its own dedicated protection category, once that wave reached sufficient scale: antivirus following the PC, VPNs following public networks, identity protection following the data-broker economy. AI-enabled consumer hardware is the sixth such wave. Unlike the five before it, its risk is physical rather than purely digital, which is why the protection layer has to be physical too. No consumer-facing company currently occupies that position.
Business model logic
CloakDots' product architecture — a free detection app, an active-interference wearable, and passive material technology — is structured to compound rather than compete internally. The free app builds category awareness and a user funnel at near-zero marginal cost; the wearable and material products convert that awareness into recurring, physical-product revenue. This mirrors the identity-protection and VPN categories that preceded it, both of which scaled through a free-to-paid funnel before consolidating into durable, high-retention markets.
Defensibility
CloakDots is building defensibility through protected technology and category leadership. Its patent-pending core approach creates an initial technical barrier, while its research base, grounded in peer-reviewed studies and government guidance, supports a credible framework for Personal Biometric Privacy and Consumer Privacy Engineering. The longer-term moat comes from external adoption: as consumers, partners, researchers and policymakers use these concepts, CloakDots can become the trusted reference point for the category.
Path to scale
CloakDots' near-term roadmap is structured around three sequential proof points, each de-risking the next stage of scale: independently validating the core technology's effectiveness, bringing its first hardware product to pilot-ready status, and growing its free app to a measurable, retained user base.
Get in touch
We're open to conversations about collaboration, research partnerships and investment, whether you're a fund, an individual investor, or working on adjacent problems yourself.
If you're working in biometric privacy, consumer hardware, or AI safety, or simply want to back what we're building, reach out and tell us more.
Or email us directly: