Persona’s $200M Series D with CEO Rick Song

Rick Song, co-founder and CEO of Persona, joins us after announcing the company’s $200 million Series D. In this episode, Rick breaks down what it means to build the verified identity layer of the internet — not just verifying who someone is, but verifying who an AI agent is acting on behalf of, and what their intent is.

We explore how identity has evolved from static credentials to something continuous and contextual, how AI is raising the stakes for online trust, and why Rick believes the future of identity must be privacy-preserving and user-controlled. He also shares how Persona scaled from an idea at Square and Dropbox to powering hundreds of millions of verifications per year.

We also covered Meta’s trillion-dollar AI forecast, Anthropic’s proposed changes to chip export rules, Microsoft’s capacity warning, and Glean’s new funding round at a $7 billion valuation.