SMS toll fraud — also called AIT (Artificially Inflated Traffic) — costs the global tech industry over $80 billion annually. Every time a startup integrates a traditional OTP API, they're opening a direct line from their revenue to automated bot networks. We built Ovrtxt to close that line, permanently.
The founders of Ovrtxt previously built a consumer fintech app that scaled to 400,000 users. In month 8, a bot network discovered our Twilio integration and pumped it for $47,000 in a single weekend. Twilio refunded nothing. Our SIM-swap fraud protection was irrelevant — we were paying attackers to attack us.
We looked for an alternative. There wasn't one. So we built it. The insight was deceptively simple: if you flip the direction of the SMS — inbound instead of outbound — the attack surface disappears entirely. A bot cannot profit from receiving a text message.
What we believe.
Security claims should be provable, not marketed. Ovrtxt's fraud immunity is a mathematical property of the inbound-SMS architecture — not a feature we can accidentally ship away in a future release.
If integrating Ovrtxt requires reading a 50-page spec, we've failed. We obsess over SDK design, error messages, and documentation until a new hire can trigger their first verification in under 10 minutes.
We charge only for successful human verifications. Our revenue goes up when your product works. Our revenue is zero when bots attack. We've designed a business model where your success is our only metric.
We're a small, senior team. If you care deeply about developer experience, distributed systems, and taking financial leverage away from fraudsters, we want to hear from you.