EIC Accelerator Report Card: Cypheme's Phone-Camera Fake Detector

Cypheme, a Paris company whose president is Hugo Garcia-Cotte, sells two ways to check with a smartphone camera whether a product is genuine: a printed label with a random pattern that its software reads, and an AI model that judges a photo of the product itself, with no label at all. The European Commission selected it in the 20 March 2020 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, in the list of "COVID19-related projects", with a grant-only award for its Microguard project, according to the EC list of selected companies. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,407,504.88 towards a total cost of €2,010,750, from 1 July 2020 to 31 March 2023, with Cypheme as the only beneficiary.

Four years after the project ended, Cypheme is active. It filed its 2025 accounts in July 2026, according to the BODACC register of legal notices, and reported a net profit of €580,681 for 2025, according to the INPI accounts data and societe.com. Lacoste uses its label-free model to spot fake polo shirts. Two of the three demonstrations promised in the EU project, with Thales and with the World Customs Organization, have never been announced.

Where Cypheme Stands Now

The French register lists CYPHEME as an active simplified joint-stock company, created on 5 January 2017 and registered on 11 January 2017, with Hugo Garcia-Cotte as president and 6 to 9 employees in the 2024 headcount band, according to the government company directory and societe.com. CB Insights and France Angels both give 2015 as the founding year, which predates the registered company. The register shows capital increases in 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021 and no insolvency notice, according to BODACC.

The company keeps publishing customer cases. In March and April 2026 its website added case studies on the door maker dormakaba, the trading card grader Ace Grading, the biotech brand U-Earth and Bangladesh's welfare ID cards. In November 2025 the Brazilian firm SecureTrace began selling a Cypheme label in Brazil under the name ID Secure, printed by Cypheme in France and licensed exclusively to SecureTrace for Brazil, according to Mobile Time. In the same month Cypheme said its label-free model had received an "AI For Less Developed Countries" award from United Nations University at a youth AI competition in Macau, according to a company post; no independent report of the award was found.

The Technology: Reading Printing Noise

Most brand protection relies on holograms, QR codes or RFID chips, which a counterfeiter can copy or move to a fake. Cypheme's approach is to authenticate the random physical detail of a print. Its first CORDIS project, a five-month SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study in 2018 with an EU contribution of €50,000, described "a micro structured varnish that can only be read with a neural network technology developed by Cypheme", according to CORDIS. Today the company sells this as the Noise Print label, which buyers photograph with a phone browser, with no app download, according to its website. Mobile Time describes the Brazilian version as a round orange sticker whose design differs with every print, with nano-cuts that destroy it when removed, and each scan logs its location.

The second product came out of the EU project. Microguard DeepTrace was described to CORDIS as an algorithm "able to extract deep spectral information from printed pigments", to authenticate goods "without any modification of the packaging or product". Cypheme now markets it as Vrai AI, a model trained on photos of genuine items that judges one detail, such as a logo, from a phone picture. Semafor reported in November 2024 that Vrai AI was being spun out of Cypheme and was funded by Cypheme's sticker sales, with the Stanford adjunct professor David G. Stork as chief scientist; whether a separate company has been formed could not be verified.

What Microguard Promised, and What the Record Shows

The periodic report covering 1 July 2021 to 31 March 2023, the only one published, lists three objectives: AI accuracy of 99% for 20 types of Lacoste care labels, up from 95%; a rebuilt cloud platform; and large-scale demonstrations of DeepTrace "with companies from the existing pipeline, including Thales", plus "AI-based mapping of a counterfeit operation in collaboration with World Customs Organisation".

The report says the move of all servers to a Docker-based architecture, load testing and a Tableau analytics layer were completed. Data collection was still "in progress" at the end, delayed until a research agreement with Lacoste gave access to its fakes. The model reached "98% accuracy" on known fake Lacoste polos "while 50% accuracy on unknown fakes", from a photo of the crocodile logo. For the demonstrations, the report lists only "detailed planning" as completed. No Thales or World Customs Organization pilot with Cypheme could be found in any public source.

1. 99% AI accuracy on Lacoste labelsPartial98% on known fakes, 50% on unknown fakes in the final report; 99.7% claimed by Cypheme in 2024.
2. Cloud platform scale-upDeliveredDocker migration and load tests reported complete; web app live at app.cypheme.com.
3. Commercial label-free authenticationDeliveredLacoste adopted the tool in November 2024, per Consumer Goods Technology and CX Today.
4. Large-scale demonstration with ThalesNot achievedNot announced by Cypheme or Thales.
5. Counterfeit mapping with the World Customs OrganizationNot achievedNo public evidence of the pilot.

The label-free product did reach a paying brand, but after the grant period. Lacoste became the first company to use it, analysing the crocodile logo, with an accuracy of 99.7% according to Cypheme, as reported by Consumer Goods Technology on 4 November 2024. Semafor reported that Lacoste's warehouse staff use it to check returned items for fakes swapped in by fraudsters. No independent test of the 99.7% figure has been published.

The Money

Cypheme is small but has reported a profit in every year with published figures since 2021: €135,731 in 2021, €151,681 in 2022, €357,915 in 2024 and €580,681 in 2025, after a loss of €160,674 in 2018, according to the INPI accounts data; societe.com gives the same 2024 and 2025 results. Its accounts are filed with a confidentiality declaration, so revenue is public only for 2022, at €422,568. Figures for 2019, 2020 and 2023 are not in the open data.

Outside funding has been modest. CB Insights lists $1.3 million raised in total, with angel investors including INSEAD Alumni Business Angels and Femmes Business Angels; France Angels reported in November 2020 that Paris Business Angels backed the company. No venture round could be verified. Cypheme is not among the 323 companies on the EIC Fund portfolio list, checked across all 17 pages.

Customers: Claims and Confirmations

Cypheme's homepage says it is "Trusted by 100+ worldwide companies" and lists logos from Lacoste to vape brands such as Puffbar. Only some of these are confirmed outside its own site. Lacoste is confirmed by trade press, and the SecureTrace licence by Mobile Time. Others rest on Cypheme's posts alone: a deal to label "600 million" items of medical protective equipment a year for the Swiss supplier Medihands, announced in April 2021; welfare ID cards in Bangladesh, announced in November 2023 without naming the agency or the number of cards; and a deployment of 115,000 labels on Incepta Pharma's cancer drug Osicent 80 described in the CORDIS report. None of these could be confirmed by the customers.

Why It Matters for Europe

Counterfeits made up about 2.3% of world imports in 2021, worth $467 billion, and 4.7% of the EU's imports, according to the 2025 OECD and EUIPO study as summarised by the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office and IP Join; the two give the EU value as 117 billion in different currencies. On 19 March 2024 the Commission adopted a recommendation, its toolbox against counterfeiting, that encourages counterfeit product recognition technologies and AI tools for enforcement and gives SMEs specific tools, according to eucrim and Dreyfus. A European, camera-only check that brands and customs officers can run without special readers fits that policy. Its COVID-19 framing, protecting masks and gloves, did not turn into a public health deployment that could be verified beyond the company's own announcements.

The Verdict

Cypheme, Lacoste, Thales and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.