Bonded: Proving Love in the Digital Age

Even a romantic trip can turn into a bureaucratic ordeal. Bonded’s founder Glen Cameron knows this firsthand. In 2017, Cameron tried to bring his wife – a Russian national – on a holiday to his native New Zealand. Despite submitting 73 pieces of evidence and reapplying three times, she was only granted a two-week tourist visa. This personal ordeal revealed a painful truth: today’s immigration systems force couples to treat love like a legal case. Across the globe, authorities demand mountains of proof – wedding photos, joint bank statements, love letters – to verify a relationship. By Cameron’s own account, visa decisions in countries like the UK can drag on for three months to two years. In the face of AI-driven fraud and tighter rules, this analog approach is breaking down. No wonder Bonded’s team warns that immigration is getting harder and couples often struggle or fail to clear this digital gauntlet.

The Problem: Love Meets Bureaucracy

The market gap is stark. Worldwide, governments are raising the bar for family visas and partner immigration. For example, in the UK the minimum income to sponsor a spouse jumped from £18,600 to £29,000 in 2024. At the same time, total family visa applications have surged – nearly 99,000 family-related visas were applied for in the year ending June 2024. Authorities now painstakingly audit each application’s evidence. But their tools are outdated: immigration systems still rely on analog evidence of relationships. Couples must dig up and organise old emails, chat logs, boarding passes and photos – then hope it all convinces a skeptical official. This stresses visas, courts, border agents and even third-country employers.

Meanwhile, new threats make matters worse. Deepfake technology and fraud have become a foe to honest couples. Automated voice and video forgeries can fake phone calls or photos, so governments have become hyper-cautious. Genuine pairs find themselves caught in a vortex of proof. As one immigration analyst puts it, officials now demand evidence “in human terms…they have to believe you”. In practice this often means checking every contact over years. The result is anxiety and delays: first-time spousal visa refusal rates in some countries hover around 20–25%, and rejected applicants face legal and financial heartbreak. In short, falling in love shouldn’t feel like assembling a legal exhibit, yet for many it does – until Bonded.

The Bonded Solution: Digital Proof of Relationship

Bonded attacks this problem head-on with a novel proof-of-relationship platform. At its core is a mobile app and protocol that continuously gathers verified evidence of a couple’s life together. As the company explains, Bonded is “a human relationship protocol and app for…immigration success”. The idea is to turn the hidden, progressive data footprint of a real relationship into a tamper-proof digital dossier.

In practice, Bonded works as a set-it-and-forget-it app. After a quick 5‑minute setup, the app runs in the background: it automatically syncs relevant data – travel records, social media check-ins, chat histories, photos, joint events, even geolocation trails – in a privacy-preserving way. Powerful AI then classifies and organizes these signals into structured evidence of the relationship. At any moment, the couple can tap one button to export a complete, time-stamped report for authorities, lawyers or border officers. In effect, every shared trip, dinner, message or video call is logged and anchored in a blockchain timeline, so it can be shown as a chronological proof of the relationship.

Bonded’s founder Glen Cameron puts it simply: global social media and smartphone usage already create a running record of our lives – progressive, multi-year data captures – which is actually a much richer identity signal than a static passport page. Bonded just helps harness that signal for the user’s benefit. “We are building verifiable proof over time,” Cameron says, noting that deception in visa cases usually occurs in a short window, whereas valid relationships span years. In technical terms, Bonded blends advanced AI with Web3 security: it uses AI to collate and filter the data, and a blockchain (the Internet Computer Protocol, ICP) to time-stamp and secure it in a GDPR-compliant way. In Cameron’s metaphor, “AI is the body… and Web3 is the skeleton” of the solution, meaning AI gives it life and Web3 gives it an immutable spine.

Key Features & Differentiators

Bonded stands out because it automates and upgrades the relationship-proof process. The most important features include:

• Automated Evidence Capture. Bonded automatically collects and secures your immigration evidence. Once set up, it constantly gathers travel itineraries, messages, photos and other relevant digital breadcrumbs without manual effort. Users no longer need to rummage through emails or screenshots – the app does it for them.
  
• AI-Curated Dossier. Built-in AI organizes the data into a logical timeline. The platform packs 100+ hours of manual organization into one-click, 10-second exports. For example, flight tickets, hotel bookings or shared calendar invites are recognized and flagged as proof of togetherness. The output is a neatly formatted file or report ready to submit.
  
• Blockchain Security & Timestamping. Every piece of evidence is encrypted and anchored on the blockchain to make it tamper-proof. The site proudly notes the service is backed by blockchain, meaning users evidence is tamper-proof, time-stamped and fully secure. In other words, an immigration officer can verify that the data hasn’t been altered.
  
• Privacy-First, User-Controlled. Bonded emphasizes self-sovereign identity. Crucially, only the user holds the keys to decrypt their records: “Your Data Stays Yours. We can’t see it. We can’t sell it. We can’t share it”. The app enforces a kill switch and lets users decide exactly what to share and when. Bonded adapts to your visa type and situation – collecting what matters most, nothing more. This ensures privacy while still giving authorities the proof they need.
  
• Efficiency & Adaptability. Because the app automatically organizes evidence, applicants can submit their applications earlier. Bonded touts speed to submit, speed to success, its AI organises, alerts and exports your applications in the blink of an eye. Earlier filing often means faster approvals. The system is also adaptable to different visa categories and rules, so it can serve couples, families, students or workers worldwide.
  
• Trustworthy Proof for Officials. Unlike generic data, Bonded’s outputs are formatted to meet official standards. By packaging data into a credible report, Bonded aims to gain acceptance from visa officers, border agents or judges. It even offers secure exports for digital submission or printable forms.
  

Together, these features make Bonded unique: it is one of the first platforms explicitly built to verify relational identity, rather than just individual identity. In a sense, Bonded creates a new digital primitive (proof of human relationship) that extends self-sovereign identity concepts from people to the ties between them. This patent-pending approach (pending details) and user-centric design differentiate Bonded from any legacy immigration tools or consumer apps.

Early Traction & Impact

Even as a new startup, Bonded is seeing early signs of real-world interest. The market potential is huge: for context, the UK alone processed ~99,000 family and partner visas in 2023-24. Worldwide, millions of couples face these paperwork hurdles each year. By addressing fraud and streamlining evidence, Bonded could significantly boost visa approval success and reduce processing times.

In practical terms, Bonded’s MVP is already complete. The team joined the Rare Founders accelerator’s April 2025 Demo Day and reported being “MVP ready by demo day”. They also participated in the Block Dojo startup program. These milestones indicate the technology is working end-to-end. Early adopters and pilot users (not yet publicly named) are being recruited to test the app. If all goes well, Bonded plans a phased rollout targeting popular visa markets first.

Case studies are forthcoming, but the founders share anecdotes of positive feedback. For example, Cameron notes that just knowing a bond of evidence exists can reduce anxiety: one user said peace of mind from Bonded’s proactive tracking is “worth its weight in gold”. More broadly, analysts expect such tools to improve fairness in immigration: bonding real relationships with digital proof should catch genuine cases that might otherwise be wrongly rejected.

Team & Milestones

Bonded’s leadership combines deep technical chops with global business experience. Glen Cameron, founder and CEO, built a career in international PR and branding, living in 15+ countries. He even won a $250,000 blockchain R&D grant to build a previous startup. Cameron’s reputation for cross-cultural marketing and strategic vision lends credibility.

Equally strong is Dr. Stef Savanah, co-founder and CTO. A blockchain and AI researcher, Savanah holds a PhD and is co-inventor on 57 UK patent applications for blockchain technologies. His technical pedigree – demonstrated by leadership roles at nChain and extensive publication – ensures the platform’s architecture is secure and cutting-edge. Between Cameron’s entrepreneurial track record and Savanah’s deep tech expertise, investors see a balanced team.

Bonded has also covered important milestones: it is registered under the UK’s SEIS/EIS schemes (offering tax relief to seed investors) and has begun pre-seed fundraising. Though details are private, the founders confirm they have already secured angel investment and are looking to close their pre-seed round. The startup’s momentum, combined with participation in respected accelerators (e.g. Rare Founders), means it is recognized in industry circles as investor-ready. Legal and compliance groundwork is in place too: Bonded’s architecture is designed to meet privacy laws (like GDPR) and it holds appropriate data protection certifications for an identity application. These elements bolster its credibility as a serious contender.

Vision & Future Outlook

Bonded’s ambitions go beyond the initial visa use case. The long-term vision is to make relational identity ubiquitous. Cameron envisions a world where proving any family or relationship link is as easy as scanning a code on your phone. For example, a border guard could instantly verify a parent-child travel claim, or an artist could prove co-ownership of a work through joint timeline evidence. The company even coins terms like relational passports – digital documents that record your network of bonds. These ideas build on the core tech: Bonded sees proof of human relationship as a foundational building block for many Web3 innovations.

Industry analysts agree that demand for this will only grow. Immigration trends show stricter vetting everywhere, from Europe to North America to Asia. Simultaneously, society generates more data about relationships – social media, messaging and cohabitation apps all create verifiable trails. Bonded aims to channel these trends: the startup’s roadmap includes adding more sophisticated AI (for example, sentiment analysis to gauge relationship strength), expanding into commercial identity (banking KYC or tenant screening), and partnering with governments or NGOs for humanitarian migration.

Looking forward, Bonded plans to use the new funds to accelerate growth. The roadmap includes finalising corporate and government partnerships (e.g. pilot programs with immigration lawyers and agencies), rolling out the consumer app globally, and building APIs for third-party services. If successful, Bonded could transform millions of visa applications and similar processes per year, reducing paperwork by orders of magnitude and making love just a little less bureaucratic. In a digital age, its founders argue, relationships deserve a native digital identity – and Bonded is aiming to become that standard.