Zamna

Zamna is a London-based identity verification company for the aviation and travel industry, founded in 2016 by a team of Oxford University graduates with backgrounds in cryptography and blockchain (originally under the name VChain Technology). Its core product validates passenger identity and Advance Passenger Information (API) data between airlines, governments, and border-control authorities without airlines and governments needing to directly share or centrally store the underlying personal data — using distributed-ledger techniques to let two parties confirm a match against each other’s records without exposing the records themselves.

That approach targets a real and specific pain point: airlines currently spend significant manual effort re-verifying passenger documents that governments have often already validated elsewhere, and each additional verification touchpoint is both a cost center and a new place for sensitive personal data to leak or be mishandled. Zamna reports that its platform has driven a 90% reduction in manual identity checks for adopting partners, which would be a meaningful operational efficiency gain if independently confirmed, though this figure originates from Zamna’s own reporting.

The company raised a $5M seed round led by LocalGlobe and Oxford Capital, with participation from Seedcamp, the London Co-Investment Fund, Telefónica, and notably airline group IAG (British Airways’ parent company) as a strategic investor — a meaningful signal, since an airline group investing directly in an identity-verification vendor suggests real industry conviction rather than just a customer relationship.

For CISOs and security leaders at airlines, airports, and border-control agencies, Zamna is relevant specifically to reducing both the data-exposure surface and the operational cost of passenger identity verification — a genuine identity-and-access-management problem in a regulatory environment (electronic travel authorizations, expanding API/PNR requirements) that is only getting more complex.