Friendly Captcha GmbH
Comment: In preparing this draft, I disclose that AI assistance was used as follows: I used DeepL and Google Translate to read articles in German, as well as read the Wikipedia pages in languages other than English. I also used Claude for help with markup syntax (e.g. how to format references, create the information box, and how to correctly link to Wikipedia pages in other languages). Robertoalencar (talk) 12:22, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
- Comment: Note from submitter: coverage is mostly German-language. The main independent source is Gründerszene/Business Insider (2023); other sources support specific facts. The page was moved to draft space for lacking sources and has since been rewritten and referenced. Feedback on notability is welcome. Robertoalencar (talk) 12:14, 19 October 2026 (UTC)
| Private (GmbH) | |
| ISIN | 🆔 |
| Industry | Computer security |
| Founded 📆 | 2020[1] |
| Founders 👔 |
|
| Headquarters 🏙️ | , , Germany |
Area served 🗺️ | |
| Products 📟 | Friendly Captcha (CAPTCHA service) |
| Members | |
Number of employees | |
| 🌐 Website | friendlycaptcha |
| 📇 Address | |
| 📞 telephone | |
Friendly Captcha is a German computer security company based in Wörthsee, Bavaria, and the name of its CAPTCHA service. Founded in 2020 by Benedict Padberg and Guido Zuidhof, the company offers a service that, instead of asking visitors to solve image or text puzzles, has the visitor's browser complete a proof of work calculation in the background.[1][2] Government accessibility guidance in Germany and Luxembourg has cited it as an example of proof-of-work CAPTCHAs.[3][4] The company won the start-up category of the Deutscher Gründerpreis in 2023.[2]
History
Friendly Captcha was founded at the end of 2020 by Benedict Padberg and Guido Zuidhof.[1] According to a 2024 profile in the magazine of the Munich and Upper Bavaria chamber of commerce, the founders financed the company from their own funds and from revenue rather than outside investment.[5]
Technology
When a user loads a page that embeds the Friendly Captcha widget, the widget presents the user's browser with a cryptographic puzzle. Solving it takes the browser a few seconds and usually requires no action from the user, while making automated mass submissions slower and more costly.[1] The difficulty of the puzzle escalates when requests appear more likely to come from a bot.[2] The underlying principle, proof of work, had been in use for decades before the company adopted it for CAPTCHAs.[1]
Reception
A guide published by the BFIT-Bund, the German federal body that monitors the accessibility of public-sector IT, lists proof-of-work methods among accessible alternatives to conventional CAPTCHAs, naming Friendly Captcha as an example. According to the guide, because the calculation runs in the background, such CAPTCHAs help users who are disadvantaged by incomprehensible, visual or audio tasks.[3] A 2025 article on the Luxembourg government's accessibility portal likewise named Friendly Captcha as an example of proof-of-work CAPTCHAs, a family it said generally performs well on both accessibility and privacy and requires little or no user interaction.[4] In a September 2025 survey of 821 Luxembourg public-sector websites, the same portal found Friendly Captcha on two sites, compared with reCAPTCHA on 98.[4]
A 2024 article in Communications of the ACM, written by the developers of the competing mCaptcha system, included Friendly Captcha in a table comparing CAPTCHA services. The table noted that Friendly Captcha works over the Tor network and is accessible to screen reader users, but that it is not open source and its validation mechanism is undocumented. It listed application-specific integrated circuits and very large botnets as possible ways to bypass it.[6]
Awards
In September 2023, Friendly Captcha won the start-up category of the Deutscher Gründerpreis, a German award for founders, at a ceremony held at the ZDF capital studio in Berlin. The other finalists in the category were Edurino and Klim.[2][1]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Räth, Georg (13 September 2023). "Captcha-Konkurrent aus Bayern: Ein Startup tritt gegen Google an" [Captcha competitor from Bavaria: A startup takes on Google]. Gründerszene (in Deutsch). Business Insider Deutschland. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Weck, Andreas (13 September 2023). "Deutscher Gründerpreis 2023: Das Startup und die Aufsteiger des Jahres" [German Founders' Prize 2023: The startup and the rising stars of the year]. t3n (in Deutsch). Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "I'm not a robot: CAPTCHAs und digitale Barrierefreiheit" [I'm not a robot: CAPTCHAs and digital accessibility] (PDF). BFIT-Bund Leitfäden (in Deutsch). Überwachungsstelle des Bundes für Barrierefreiheit von Informationstechnik (BFIT-Bund). p. 7. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
Proof-of-Work-Verfahren (z. B. Friendly CAPTCHA)
Unknown parameter|trans-quote=ignored (help) - ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 "CAPTCHA, when security takes precedence over accessibility". accessibilite.public.lu. Service information et presse, Government of Luxembourg. 22 September 2025. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
A new family of CAPTCHAs is based on the proof-of-work approach (e.g., Friendly Captcha, Cap, mCaptcha, etc.) and generally yields good results in terms of both accessibility and privacy.
- ↑ Armbruster, Martin (May 2024). "Mann mit Vision" [Man with a vision]. IHK-Magazin (in Deutsch). No. 05–06/2024. IHK für München und Oberbayern. Retrieved 19 October 2026.
- ↑ Manivannan, Aravinth; Sethuraman, Sibi Chakkaravarthy; Sudhakaran, Devi Priya Vimala (October 2024). "mCaptcha: Replacing Captchas with Rate Limiters to Improve Security and Accessibility". Communications of the ACM. 67 (10): 70–80. doi:10.1145/3660628.
External links
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