AetherIDv0.1

About AetherID

AetherID is a Cortex Innovations venture, registered at SRTIP Sharjah. We build infrastructure for the agentic internet — where AI agents increasingly act on behalf of humans and need verifiable, portable structures to read and trust.

What we're building

Two ventures in parallel, both infrastructure for AI-mediated work, both under Cortex Innovations:

AetherID is the identity expression of that thesis. Who you are, what you've done, what you stand for — all structured, all under your control, all readable by any AI without going through a platform that monetises your attention. An open signing authority for verifiable professional claims in the agentic internet. Built in the same category as Sigstore (for software artifacts), Let's Encrypt (for domains), and npm provenance (for package authorship), applied to professional identity.

Stratafy is our sister venture. It covers the strategy expression of the same thesis — where your organisation is going, what it believes, how it decides — structured as code, readable by AI, owned by the team. Stratafy is currently in active design-partner mode with scaling companies that want their strategy to live as a typed system rather than as scattered documents.

Both are bets on the same broader thesis: AI works better when the human context it operates on is structured, signed, and portable, rather than scraped or inferred from whatever fragments happen to exist in the public web. Identity is one domain that needs this. Strategy is another. The lessons compound — schema-first discipline, standards-anchored design, owner-pull architecture — and inform both ventures.

Why two ventures, not one product?

The infrastructure thesis is general. The expressions are specific. Identity needs different design constraints than strategy — different schemas, different verification primitives, different network effects, different threat models, different regulatory environments. Trying to ship them as features of one product would compromise both.

Cortex Innovations exists to ship both deliberately, with the architectural discipline appropriate to each. AetherID's roadmap is shaped by W3C VC 2.0, DID resolution standards, eIDAS 2.0, and supply-chain trust infrastructure precedent. Stratafy's roadmap is shaped by strategic-methodology research, organisational-decision-making patterns, and what scaling-company executives actually use in practice. The two roadmaps inform each other but don't merge.

The team

Leonard Cremer — Founder. Previously co-founded TROOP (TroopTravel), the corporate meetings management platform, where he served as Co-CEO and CTO from 2017 to 2025. Under his leadership TROOP raised $19M+ across multiple rounds including Madrona Ventures, scaled across South Africa and internationally, and exited in 2025.

Engineering graduate from the University of Johannesburg with deep experience in high-volume transaction systems and telecom infrastructure across the African market. Now based in Cape Town, building AetherID and Stratafy from the southern tip of Africa with corporate structure at SRTIP Sharjah.

Outside the work: professional rally co-driver for the Century Racing Team, competing in the Dakar Rally and major South African cross-country events. The same focus on precision under pressure that informs how he builds products.

His AetherID profile is the first publicly-discoverable profile in the directory — opted in deliberately as the seed. Default discoverability for new users remains private.

Technical co-founder — to be announced. AetherID's signing infrastructure and protocol architecture is being shaped in collaboration with a confirmed technical lead, to be named publicly once that partnership is formalised. We won't be naming placeholders.

Why Cortex Innovations, SRTIP Sharjah

The Cortex Innovations entity sits at the Sharjah Research, Technology and Innovation Park (SRTIP) in the UAE. The rationale is structural, not exotic:

Digital identity infrastructure is increasingly subject to regional regulation — EU eIDAS 2.0 deploying late 2026, US state-level privacy laws expanding, POPIA in South Africa, UAE PDPL. Operating from a jurisdiction with progressive digital-identity policy and clear regulatory frameworks made more sense than incorporating purely in a single home market. SRTIP offers free-zone qualifying-income status, 100% foreign ownership, no exchange controls, USD banking, and a clean regulatory environment for tech ventures.

The geographic reality of how we work also informs the choice: founder in Cape Town, distributed team flexibility, time-zone overlap with both EU and East Asian markets, investor-friendly structure that supports US institutional capital without forcing a Delaware flip at the wrong stage.

Where AetherID is right now

AetherID is in a six-week build-and-test window, ending 3 July 2026. The goal is to ship the minimum mechanism that tests whether the portability claim is real — can someone create their AetherID in one AI tool and have it meaningfully improve their experience in a second, different AI tool — and then decide whether to commit fully, fold into Stratafy as a feature, or shelve.

We're operating in public during this window. The canonical prompt is live at aetherid.ai/prompt/v1.0.2. Profiles can be created — visit aetherid.ai and run the prompt. The schema is published as v1.0-draft, open for tool-maker feedback through 22 July 2026 before locking to v1.0-final. If you're reading this and have thoughts, we want them.

What we're not

A few things worth being explicit about, because the category-confusion temptation is real:

Not a LinkedIn alternative. We're not building a network, a feed, or an engagement loop. We don't make money from how often you post, who you follow, or what you do on the platform. The product is structurally incompatible with engagement-economy mechanics.

Not a data broker. We don't build, store, or expose a profile on anyone who hasn't personally claimed and verified it. The principle is structural — no enrichment of non-users, no proactive dossier-building, no scraping. Owner-pull only.

Not a bundled identity stack from a platform that monetises your attention. We're an open protocol. Schema published. SDK open source. Anyone can implement against it without going through us. The infrastructure survives the steward — if AetherID-the-company fails, the W3C-anchored JSON-LD records on user-controlled storage keep working.

How to get involved

If you want to follow what we're building, aetherid.ai is the canonical source. The manifesto explains what we're doing and why; the prompt is what you run if you want to create your own AetherID.

We respond to all substantive inbound within 48 hours during the build window.