Investigation software, built by investigators.

We are Anton and Anne-mari van Staden — married, and both investigators by profession.

Anton has been an investigator nearly all his working life, starting as an officer in the South African Police Force in 1990. The decades since have been spent inside real investigations: taking statements, working dockets, following the evidence wherever it led, and standing in the witness box in criminal matters. Anne-mari has been an investigator since 2009. In 2010 she founded Precision Polygraph, the first local official polygraph company in New Zealand — and back in South Africa she testified in the High Court for IPID, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, the official watchdog that investigates alleged criminal offences by SAPS and Metro Police members.

Anton has worked for IPID too — on its cold cases: the dockets that had gone quiet, where the answer was still in the file, waiting for someone to read it properly. When the watchdog that polices the police needs findings that survive the High Court, that is the standard of work this product was built to.

That courtroom discipline shaped everything about Conectir. When you have testified under cross-examination, you learn a rule that never leaves you: a finding is only as good as the trail behind it. If you cannot show exactly where it came from — the original words, in the original language, with every step recorded — it does not survive.

Credibility assessment became our shared specialty. We are both internationally recognised polygraph examiners, trained by an accredited American Polygraph Association school, and we both served as directors of the South African Polygraph Federation — Anton as Director of Administration and Communication, Anne-mari as Director of Ethics and Standards, later re-elected as Director of Training and Development. We taught the craft too, lecturing part-time in interviewing skills for forensic examiners at Enterprises, University of Pretoria (formerly CE@UP) — Anton in interrogation, interviewing and forensic assessment interviewing techniques; Anne-mari in Scientific Content Analysis (SCAN), micro-expressions and body language. And once, memorably, we were the interrogators in the season finale of Special Forces: Ultimate Hell Week on BBC Two.

The work has taken us far beyond one jurisdiction. Between us we have investigated in South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Zambia and New Zealand; Anton’s work also took him to Iraq and Afghanistan, and Anne-mari has lectured in Kenya. And for the last five years, our casework has been in Eswatini — where Conectir was built, on live investigations.

Between the examiner’s chair, the lecture hall and the witness box, we spent our careers on one question, from every side: how do you assess what a person tells you — fairly, carefully, and without fooling yourself?

That question is exactly why Conectir works the way it does. Years of credibility work taught us how dangerous it is when a machine — any machine — hands down a verdict on a human being. So we built Conectir to do the opposite. It reads every statement in the words the person actually used — the same Scientific Content Analysis discipline Anne-mari taught, now working at machine speed. It lines every account up on one timeline and points at what does not fit. It offers an innocent explanation alongside every flag. And then it gets out of the way, because the judgement belongs to the investigator — not to the software.

Real cases don’t arrive in one language, in order, agreeing with each other. They arrive as a stack of statements — a witness here, a complainant there, a suspect’s account — each remembering things a little differently. Read them one at a time and the contradictions hide in the gaps. Translate them first and you lose the very signals that matter. Conectir fixes both problems at once, and turns the result into a report that stands up in front of a regulator, an insurer, or a court.

We started where the need is sharpest: investigators in Southern Africa, working multilingual caseloads with little tooling. That is not an abstraction to us — it is where we work, every day. The same engine serves insurance fraud teams, private investigators, corporate compliance, and defence lawyers — and we grow into those as we earn the right to.