By Steve Watkins – Staff reporter, Cincinnati Business Courier
Nov 19, 2025
Updated Nov 19, 2025 2:58pm EST
A tech startup backed by the University of Cincinnati and launched by two professors there has received a state grant to help fuel growth. And after greatly expanding the potential use for its product, it's looking to raise a lot more money.
Carbon Copy Assets, a firm that’s changing its name to TapIn, won the $200,000grant from the Ohio Third Frontier Commission, a tech-based economic-development initiative.
Michael Jones and Jordan Tate developed technology that enables users to tap their phone at a location to prove they were actually there.
“We started it as a way to verify a person’s physical presence at a particular time and location,” Jones, co-founder and principal scientist at TapIn, told me.
They launched the firm last year with the help of $115,000 in entrepreneurship funding through UC’s 1819 Venture Lab program. That came after they went through the Venture Lab pre-accelerator program in the 1819 Innovation Hub,where the firm’s office is located.
They initially developed it to target university students on scholarships who need to prove they showed up to volunteer or attended events and career fairs. They later found that it could be useful to college athletes who want to protect and prove their personal brand by showing they were present for volunteer activities and even promotional events tied to getting paid for their name, image and likeness.
But they found broader uses than just the university setting. Artificial intelligence in particular opened up a whole new realm for the technology to explore.
“We don't know who's on the other side of that tweet,” said Jones, who also is an assistant professor of economics at UC. “We don't know if the mouse click on and came from a bot or from a human being. There are tons of scams right now.”
Enter TapIn’s service. It proves that an actual person did something or showed up somewhere. It’s talking to restaurants about deploying the technology. That provides proof an online review came from someone who actually was at the restaurant.
“This is a technology that proves personhood, that proves there’s a person on the other side of that data,” Jones said. “That’s been the biggest evolution in how we thought about the company, and I think that is why the state is funding it. We'retackling like the biggest problem right now with artificial intelligence.”
After TapIn first rolled out the technology, students started realizing they could use it for other purposes. They could prove they were at a sporting event to access sponsor offers without scanning a QR code from the scoreboard, show when they arrived and left an Airbnb or prove their attendance at a nonprofit event.
A special education provider can prove to a parent they visited their child in a school when they were scheduled.
Jones plans to use the Third Frontier grant money to expand the uses for the technology. He’ll hire software programmers and build the company’s sales force.The firm has seven employees now.
Tate, a fine arts professor at UC’s College of Design, Architecture, Art andPlanning (DAAP), is stepping away from day-to-day involvement in the business,Jones said. They both still own the patent for the technology.
That expanded use of the technology is important because TapIn is taking a big swing.
“We want to become a unicorn company,” Jones said. “You need a really big market to do that.”
That also helped attract the Third Frontier grant.
“The state is really interested in technologies that are game changing,” Jones said.“They really want to fund technologies that are really solving a big problem.”
To back that big swing, TapIn will start fundraising for a seed capital round“very soon,” Jones said. He’s targeting $1.5 million to $2 million for that investment round.
TapIn’s system works like this: The place of deployment – a classroom, nonprofit,volunteer event, restaurant or many others – installs a sensor it buys from TapIn.That typically costs $100 or less. It also buys the software through a subscription to gather and track the data.
Uses can be customized. TapIn’s system was used recently at a college career fair.Students tapped in to show which companies they visited. But they also were asked at the end to select two potential employers that were their top choices. That gave companies an idea of which candidates were most interested.
The system has been deployed at numerous universities and now at other venues.
The growth has been powerful so far, although that’s easier to come by in the early stages of a company’s development. Still, TapIn has seen growth of around50% each month compared to the prior month in the number of taps it has processed. It had more than 2,500 users and nearly 5,000 taps in October.
“Students love it,” Jones said. “It's like, ‘I don't have to do a QR code.’ It's remarkable how many people still have sign-in sheets. We replace pen and paper,QR codes, card swipes any kind of check-in system.”
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