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!

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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.

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