Most people picture counterfeits as a knockoff handbag on a folding table in New York. Roei Ganzarski pictures a brake pad.
“When are you going to find out that an airbag is fake?” asks the CEO of Alitheon, an optical AI firm. “When you’re dead, because it didn’t open up, or you are maimed because it exploded in your face. And at that point, it’s too late.”
The examples are not hypothetical. Fake brake pads and airbags surface in the market on a regular basis. Counterfeiters refilled genuine HIV medication bottles with antipsychotics and over-the-counter painkillers, resealed them to look untouched, and sold more than 85,000 bottles into U.S. pharmacies — where patients actually took them. In aviation, Ganzarski points to within roughly a year, one distributor’s falsified documentation put suspect engine components on more than 100 aircraft, and forged material records pushed questionable titanium into Boeing 737 MAX, 787, and Airbus A220 airframes built between 2019 and 2023.
Alitheon believes the answer is not a better label or a shinier hologram sticker. It is no label at all.
The company’s software – FeaturePrint – lets an ordinary camera, even a phone, identify an individual physical item by the microscopic surface irregularities unique to that one object. No tag, no chip, no sticker, no barcode. The item becomes its own ID.
“Think of it as biometrics for things,” Ganzarski said. “It’s not about saying this is a brake pad, or even a legitimate brake pad. Rather, it’s this exact brake pad, made by that company, in that factory, on that date.”
Fingerprints are used to put a person in jail, he notes. His company applies the same standard of proof to physical objects.
The distinction matters because an example of the fraud Alitheon solves does not involve fakes at all. Ganzarski describes a scheme in which “collectors” buy medication cheaply off patients, launder it back into distribution through wholesalers using falsified paperwork, and it reaches pharmacy shelves as new stock — one such ring cost New York Medicaid over $500 million. . The product is genuine. The label is a lie. Because with FeaturePrint the record is the physical item itself, a single photo can reveal what the original manufacturer actually stamped on it, no matter what a sticker or paperwork claims.
The industry has started paying attention. This year, the AI Breakthrough Awards named the company’s platform its Authentication Technology of the Year, and its customer list has grown to include manufacturers in some of the most safety-critical corners of the global economy.
The human cost drives him more than the market size. He returns, unprompted, to the people who bought those HIV pills.
“Imagine the person doing that,” he said. “They’re knowingly going to harm people that have HIV. It’s crazy.”
His measure of success is specific. Not headlines, not another award, but the day safety-critical industries come to him first.
“When we pop the champagne, it’s going to be because healthcare companies and automotive companies and aerospace companies are calling us and saying, hey, we need to talk.”
Until then, the cameras keep taking pictures. And every picture makes one more object impossible to commit fraud with.
