Make presence provable. And make the proof worth trusting.
A verification platform is only useful if its answers hold up: to an auditor, to an insurer, to a tribunal, to a sceptical engineer reading the webhook payload. So quality is not a feature of presence.tools. It is the product.
That means we would rather return a failed challenge than a flattering one. It means confidence scores you can defend, signed payloads you can verify independently, and an API that behaves the same way on the ten-thousandth call as it did on the first. It means saying no to features that would make the numbers look better than the truth.
If we ever have to choose between growth and the integrity of a presence record, the record wins. That's the whole company in one sentence.
presence.tools wasn't built for a pitch deck. It was built because we needed it.
Alpaka Ltd has been building management software since 2014: scheduling, clocking, and compliance for sectors where attendance isn't a formality but a duty of care. For years, the hardest question our customers asked was also the simplest: how do I know this person was actually there?
We built the answer into Alpaka: geolocation checks, facial matching, signed records. We ran it in production, on real shifts, for real workers, until it was boring. Boring is the highest compliment infrastructure can receive.
Then we did the obvious thing: we unbundled it.
Alpaka was client #0. Every challenge type in this API earned its place in live deployments before it ever appeared in our docs.
Presence records created every day across the platform. Each one a small, signed answer to that same simple question.
You're not integrating a prototype. You're integrating the part of our own product we trusted enough to bet payroll on.
We are a small, independent, family-owned UK company. No outside investors, no growth-at-any-cost mandate, no incentive to ship anything we wouldn't run ourselves.
Small is a feature here. The person who answers your support email has commit access. Decisions about the API are made by people who are on call for it. And because we've been profitable and independent since the beginning, we get to optimise for the only metric that compounds: whether the product deserves your trust.
We work the way we hope our customers can: remotely, flexibly, and judged on output rather than presence. Which, given what we sell, we appreciate is a little ironic. The difference is consent and purpose. Verification should exist to protect people and settle questions fairly, never to surveil them. That principle is written into our Biometric AUP, and we mean it.
Phill has been building software for more than twenty years, and Alpaka since 2014. He describes the job as selling people their own time back: automating, speeding up, or eradicating anything that keeps people from their kids, cats and TVs. presence.tools is that idea applied to a single stubborn question: was this person actually there?
Book a call → · LinkedIn →Kate's teaching and arts background gives her the keen eye that keeps presence.tools honest. If a word, a screen, or an idea doesn't feel right, it doesn't ship. Officially her remit is undefined. Unofficially, it's everything that matters.
presence.tools is operated by Alpaka Ltd, a company registered in England under company number 10461680. Registered office: 6 The Leys, Northampton, NN2 6QZ, UK.
Questions, scepticism, and awkward security questions welcome: hello@presence.tools