TL;DR:
- EarnOS closed a $6 million pre-Series A round led by 1kx, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures and Social Graph Ventures.
- The startup also received a non-dilutive strategic investment of $12.5 million from Verona, bringing total funding to $18.5 million.
- Its app ero exits beta in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom with over $30 million in rewards.
EarnOS raised a total of $18.5 million in funding and officially launched its application ero out of beta in four markets: the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. The $6 million pre-Series A round was led by 1kx, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures and Social Graph Ventures. Added to that is a non-dilutive $12.5 million four-year investment from Verona, the layer-1 blockchain formerly known as XION.
Ero’s business model targets one of the digital ecosystem’s most persistent problems: the proliferation of bots and fake traffic. According to estimates cited by the company, more than 50% of internet traffic is generated by bots, and up to 25% of performance advertising spend is lost to invalid or automated traffic. Brands, EarnOS notes, lose more than $100 billion per year for that reason.
EarnOS: Verified Internet
Ero inverts that model, allowing brands to pay only for verified actions performed by real people. Verification is carried out through zkTLS technology, which confirms identity and behavior without storing sensitive user data. Its payments infrastructure combines non-custodial wallets from Turnkey with the card infrastructure of Rain, enabling rewards to be converted into real spending power.
Preserving User Privacy Is Crucial
Phil George, founder and CEO of EarnOS, defined this initiative as building the “Verified Internet“. Peter Pan, partner at 1kx, highlighted that the ability to verify identity and behavior without sacrificing privacy has become fundamental in an environment where artificial intelligence and bots are reshaping digital channels.
The app is already available on App Store and Google Play. To drive expansion, EarnOS brought on Harrison Kennedy, former growth director of Uber Eats in Asia-Pacific, as Head of Growth Strategy and Expansion. The launch also includes approximately $30 million in annualized missions committed by brands across sectors such as retail, streaming, transportation and consumer finance, among them Uber, Nike, Lacoste and The North Face.
