About Captcha, Inc.

History

In the very beginning, Captcha, Inc (then called Lanap/Lanapsoft) was formed around one simple idea – to build the first commercially available captcha software on the market. Following a period of frantic development, we succeeded.

Being the first is always great, but as numerous software vendors before us had discovered -- being the only game in town doesn't last -- after some time, we had quite a lot of competitors, indeed.

It was supposed to be a bog-standard technology life-cycle -- but it wasn't meant to be!

Sometime in the period of 2012-14 Google became an obsessive stalker; turned their Recaptcha into Recaptcha the Stalker; and went into overdrive with abuse of their organic and paid search monopolies. With antitrust violations aplenty, our competitors were slaughtered in no time flat.

What was the other day a healthy market with plenty of choices -- became a hopelessly rigged market with what one might see as an oddly-shaped duopoly in it. Someone else might not see an oddly-shaped duopoly at all -- but rather a set of two unevenly-sized monopolies instead.

Whatever way that duopoly vs. a set of two monopolies dilemma might be resolved within your national jurisdiction -- BotDetect is the non-stalking, both privacy and national security friendly, captcha-as-a-software, part of it -- the one where it is the money that is changing hands.

Google's Recaptcha the Stalker, an Identity + TokBind Stalking play, is the other part -- the one where the users' data is changing hands. Maybe OK for a cat picture blog -- but troublesome for an even remotely national security sensitive site, or for a site that has the GDPR applicable on it.

If you do not like the choices, please note that we would appreciate if you give a call to your elected representative, or to the local antitrust enforcement authority -- and tell them a word or two about it. Google's antitrust violations ain't gonna stop -- until they get stopped -- and those folks are paid to do it!

Quick Facts

  • In 2004, BotDetect™ ASP.NET CAPTCHA was the world's first commercially available CAPTCHA component. The PHP & Java ports were first released in 2012 and 2014.
  • Nowadays, the paid version users are located in 80+ different countries; while the free version is used more or less everywhere.
  • For more than a decade now, Captcha, Inc is a geographically dispersed, officeless, micro-multinational. Our research and development is spread all over Vietnam; while the rest of the team is scattered around Croatia, Ireland, and Canada.
  • With ~95% of the stock owned by the founders and management, minuscule debt owned by the FFFs and insiders, and living off our own revenues -- we are here to stay!
  • If you wish to pass by for a drink, HCMC (Saigon), Vietnam, or Split, Croatia might be your best bet. However, make an appointment well in advance; otherwise, you might easily hit the time when we are not there.

Management Team

M. Plestina, CEO

Mr. Plestina founded Captcha, Inc in 2004.
His previous experiences stretch from frying hamburgers to the years of C/C++ coding.

L. Mioc, CMO

Mr. Mioc joined as the CMO in 2006.
He previously spent 19 years in different roles at various (mostly technology) startups.

L.V. Doan, CTO

Mr. Doan joined as our first VN developer in 2014.
He led our development team, and then took over as the CTO in 2016.

L.H. Hoang, HR Manager

Ms. Hoang, a finance girl running HR, joined in 2014.
She moved our development to Vietnam and takes care of our team ever since.

Contact Us

If you have a sales inquiry -- please use this form.

If you have a technical support inquiry -- please use this form.

If you have a licensing question -- see the licensing section here -- and then use this form.