Indicio has been recognized for its pioneering work in digital travel credentials, with real-world border, air travel, and tourist deployments, and for successfully applying decentralized identity to AI to boost operational performance, security, and data-privacy compliance.
By Trevor Butterworth
PhocusWire’s annual Hot 25 Startups identifies the most dynamic and disruptive companies in the travel, tourism and hospitality sectors — and for 2026, Indicio is on its hot list, thanks to our award-winning decentralized identity technology — Indicio Proven®,
Indicio Proven is providing trusted digital identity for travelers in Africa and the Caribbean (and soon, Europe), enabling pre-authorized travel, seamless border crossing, and shorter lines at airports, all while delivering superior security, data privacy, and better traveler experiences.
A member of Nvidia’s Inception Program and recently partnered with NEC , Indicio is also pioneering the use of decentralized identity in AI systems using agents, enabling AI agents to hold verifiable digital identities so that they can prove who they represent to travelers, ask permission to access data, share that data with other agents, and deliver next-generation customer service across travel systems, loyalty programs, and tourist services.
So yes, we agree with PhocusWire: We’re hot!
How Indicio Proven brings the heat
Indicio Proven is a platform that plugs into your platform to make things easier, faster, simpler on the front and on the back end.
What things? Identity authentication, access management, data sharing, integration, compliance, security.
Decentralized identity isn’t just for identifying people, it’s also for identifying organizations, devices, AI agents, and being able to securely share and authenticate the data they need to act on.
Decentralized identity uses Verifiable Credentials to make all this possible. They make data fully portable and instantly verifiable anywhere — even offline.
With Indicio Proven, you are able to add an authenticated biometric to a Verifiable Credentials and create a “government grade” digital identity in minutes.
Indicio Proven transforms travel, tourism, hospitality
More and more people are traveling and want to travel. According to a recent report by the World Travel Council, 14 billion passengers will be flying annually by 2035 — a forecast that exceeds previous estimates and 2025 passenger numbers (9.8 billion).
How are airports, airlines, border control, and every related service to contend with this increased demand? How is the tourist sector to manage a world where everyone wants to go on vacation but fewer and fewer people are available to serve them?
At the same time as travel has been democratized, people want experiences over things. Waiting in endless lines or struggling through complex online processes are not what they have in mind. But that’s what they are facing if we can’t simplify operations and increase capacity.
This is where Indicio Proven comes in. With Indicio Proven, you can build automated operations around trusted data. This means using Digital Travel Credentials (DTC) to pre-authorize travel long before a passenger leaves for the airport. This means being able to leverage that trusted data for seamless authentication throughout the airport — and all the way to hotel check in and beyond.
It also means being able to do all this in the most secure way possible, by removing all the vulnerabilities that are fueling the explosion in identity fraud. For example, the cryptography that provides assurance of proof in a Verifiable Credential is AI resistant; the authenticated biometrics in a DTC provides a simple way to avoid deepfakes.
This makes challenges, like automating hotel check-in, simple. Chargeback fraud, on the other hand, becomes difficult because you can’t share or steal a Verifiable Credential and fake authorize a payment.
New kinds of services around data and real-time data become easy to implement because passengers and guests can consent to share their data simplifying GDPR.
Indicio Proven and decentralized identity are a minimalist’s dream of lego: how to build a network for sharing and using trusted data with the fewest number of parts, the least friction, the least expense, and with the most flexibility to add new elements and scale.
And the neat thing? You can plug this lego into your existing systems and get going in weeks.
Global interoperability ensures that travelers equipped with Indicio Proven credentials can go from anywhere to anywhere.
Why travel AI systems need Indicio Proven
While AI in travel isn’t new, it often shows itself to be not very useful. We’ve all dealt with chatbots that can tell you your flight time but not much else. Or they paralyze you with authentication requests that require multiple data points from different apps and emails.
Indicio Proven takes the same seamless approach to crossing a border and applies it to interacting with an AI agent.
When a passenger and an AI agent interact, each mutually authenticates the other’s identity before any data is shared.
This is absolutely critical for security and trust. A traveler has to trust that the AI agent is legitimate and not spoofed. But the AI agent also needs to verify that the traveler’s identity is real too.
Only decentralized identity provides a secure way to do this. Legacy, centralized approaches cannot deliver the security needed for deploying AI agents.
After mutual authentication, the traveler consents to share their data. This is vital for GDPR compliance.
The AI Agent then accesses structured data that has been digitally signed to make it tamper proof ·(even from malicious AI).
The AI Agent can also ask for permission to share the passenger’s data with one or more other agents, and with that consent can execute increasingly complex tasks — for example, an airline agent could interact with a railway agent to book a ticket using the traveler’s air miles.
We call this delegated authority and it’s essential to both enabling AI to scale and to do so in a compliant way.
The result: frictionless, next-gen customer service. Travelers can carry their identity in a way that’s verified, private, and reusable, and AI can personalize responses and services in real time because it’s working with actual data, not guesses or outdated records.
Other analysts are also taking note
Gartner, Forrester, IDC, S&P Global, and Juniper Research have all recognized Indicio as a company driving digital transformation through decentralized identity.
Our team is leading the work to help develop and support open standards, like OpenID4VC, and to drive global interoperability.
There isn’t going to be one digital credential that will cover every possible use case; that’s fine. The key is to make today’s — and tomorrow’s — digital credentials interoperate with each other seamlessly, so it’s just not an issue for anyone.
Thank you, PhocusWire
If you think about what we’re doing, we’re enabling data to travel anywhere, independently. We allow data to be created so that any border — a device, a system — can verify where it’s come from, if it has been manipulated, and whether it is to be trusted. You could say, we’re kinda like a travel company for the next era of the internet. And we’re tremendously grateful to PhocusWire to see all this work recognized. It brings the future even closer.
Contact us
If you are in the travel, tourism, or hospitality business, we’d love to show you how easy this all is to implement and to talk about how our customers are using Indicio Proven to extend their leadership in their sectors (and — no pressure — possibly yours).
We have solutions for hotel check-in, payments, ticketing, customer service, employee access, reducing chargeback fraud, along with the building blocks for deploying them: a white-label digital wallet and mobile SDK.
You need trusted data to master the future? We’ve got you covered.
Read the full PhocusWire announcement here.