SOUL
SOUL is building the largest opt-in real-world presence dataset, capturing physical presence, co-presence, and continuity over time through a passive consumer app called Soul Mode. The platform verifies human participation in the physical world—something that cannot be simulated—by recording coarse location and time-based overlap with other participants while users go about their day. Their launch initiative, The Exit, had over 2,000 participants formally disable their Instagram and TikTok accounts within the first 48 hours.
- Artificial Intelligence
- Applications
- Social Networking
- Software Only
Funding
Founders
Product
Problem
Digital identity has collapsed as automation, bots, and synthetic personas now operate freely online, making accounts easy to create and behavior easy to fake. Engagement no longer correlates with real humans, and there is no reliable way to verify participation in the physical world.
Solution
SOUL captures the highest-fidelity human signal—physical presence over time, witnessed by others—through opt-in participation. When Soul Mode is active, notifications pause and social feeds disappear while the phone passively records presence windows, coarse location, and time-based overlap with other participants. No interaction is required; users simply go about their day as SOUL observes continuity in the background. The resulting data generates Presence Scores based on consistency, duration, and recurrence, plus witnessed Presence Graphs built from co-presence over time. Since presence is expensive to fake and recurrence compounds signal strength, the dataset provides human data that cannot be simulated.
Target Audience
Primary participants are individuals willing to opt into a credible alternative to social platforms, as well as organizations and systems builders that need verified human presence data that cannot be simulated by bots or synthetic personas.
Features
- Passive presence capture that does not increase screen time, recording coarse location and time-based overlap without requiring user interaction
- Presence Scores computed from consistency, duration, and recurrence of physical presence
- Witnessed Presence Graphs built from co-presence over time, eliminating self-reporting bias through peer witnessing
- Privacy-first architecture that does not collect content, store movement trails, or sell raw location data; all signals are coarse, aggregated, anonymized, and user-consented
- The Exit movement—a coordinated initiative that has already drawn over 2,000 participants to publicly resign from Instagram and TikTok in favor of the SOUL system