About Us

Factiverse AS designs and builds powerful AI-driven fact-checking and authoring tools for newsrooms. Our award-winning team consists of researchers and professionals in journalism, data science, gamification and design.

We founded the company in 2020 with the goal to automate the detection of false information online. Since the start, our company has received 1 million euros in public and private funding to research and develop solutions for media, finance and compliance.

Our backers and collaborators are the Norwegian Research Council, Innovation Norway, MediaFutures EU, Startuplab, Valide Invest, ITSA, Media City Bergen, and the University of Stavanger. In 2021 we were part of the Journalism AI Collab at Clwstwr, LSE and BBC NewsLabs funded by the Google News Initiative.

The founding team consists of Vinay Setty and Maria Amelie. Vinay Setty is CTO & Founder, and the company is based on his research as an associate professor in text mining at the University of Stavanger. He has spent the past 12 years researching text and graph mining at Max Planck Institute, Aalborg University, UiO.  In 2021, Vinay Setty ventured deeper into fake news detection after internal funding at the University of Stavanger (UiS) - (“Funds for Younger Excellent Researchers”) L3S Research Center at the Leibniz Universität Hannover (DE).

Our CEO & Co-Founder Maria Amelie worked as a tech journalist since 2010, winning an award as Best Startup journalist in 2015. In parallel, she has written five non-fiction books on technology, migration and entrepreneurship. In 2011, her first book led to a change in the Norwegian immigration law and she was awarded the Norwegian of the year for putting the focus on undocumented refugees in Europe.

Together with Gaute Kokkvoll, Head of Product and Chris Maxwell, Head of Engineering and a team of data scientists, developers and students, we work on commercializing the technology that Vinay Setty developed at the University, as well as developing new solutions.