Eli Wachs

The Story

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Eli Wachs runs Footprint from 201 Varick Street in Manhattan, and the pitch he gives has stayed remarkably consistent since he first wrote it down. Footprint is an identity verification and onboarding platform. When a bank, an auto dealer, a real estate firm, or a marketplace needs to confirm that a new customer is who they say they are, Footprint runs the checks - KYC, anti-money-laundering screening, fraud detection - and stores the resulting personal data inside secure enclaves rather than an ordinary database. Wachs describes the ambition in plain terms: to be the last identity form a person ever fills out online.

He calls it the identity layer of the internet, and sometimes, more bluntly, the Apple Pay of identity. The analogy is deliberate. Apple Pay did not invent the credit card; it made using one across apps and stores feel effortless and safe. Wachs wants the same for identity: verify yourself once, then carry that verified status from service to service, handing over only the specific pieces of data each company actually needs.

That sentence is the crux of his worldview, and it is more contrarian than it sounds. Much of the privacy conversation of the last decade has been about restriction - lock the data away, minimize what is collected, wall everything into silos. Wachs, who spent his Stanford years studying GDPR and CCPA up close, came to think those laws were well-intentioned but aimed at the wrong target. The problem, in his telling, is not that data moves. It is that people do not control it. Give a person real ownership over their identity, and sharing becomes a feature rather than a threat.

A founder since ninth grade

Wachs grew up in Philadelphia, a begrudging 76ers supporter who read Peter Diamandis's book Abundance in ninth grade and, a few emails later, started High School HeroesX - incentivized competitions that pushed students to tackle local problems, from education gaps to food safety. As a freshman at Stanford he co-founded Decdis, which tracked flu strains to recommend lockdowns and, in theory, head off pandemics. Neither venture made him famous, but together they set a pattern: find a systemic problem, then try to build the thing that fixes it.

History was his favorite subject, and he has a line he likes about it. "Technology was how the history of tomorrow was created," he has said - his way of explaining why a kid who loved studying how the world worked ended up trying to change how it works. After graduating with a degree in economics and history, he went to the growth equity firm General Atlantic, where he led work across identity, privacy, and security. He left with two convictions that would become Footprint's foundation: to own your data, you need to own your identity; and digital ownership begins with better identity verification.

In February 2020, from a Stanford dorm room, he wrote the first Footprint business plan. The mission on that page - put people in control of their data - is the same one he repeats now. Two years later, in 2022, he launched the company out of stealth with Alex Grinman, a cryptography engineer who had co-founded Krypt.co before it was acquired by Akamai. Grinman became CTO. The pairing matters: a history major with a thesis about data ownership, and an engineer who had already shipped hard security infrastructure.

The engineering underneath the pitch

The part of Footprint that is easy to overlook is the plumbing. To make identity portable without turning the company into a giant honeypot, Footprint stores sensitive personal information inside secure enclaves - isolated, cryptographically protected compute environments where data can be processed without being casually exposed. It is unglamorous work, and Wachs has documented it publicly in a series he calls "Inside the Enclave." The bet is that the companies who win in identity will be the ones who do the boring cryptographic work correctly, not the ones with the loudest marketing.

Customers seem to respond to results rather than rhetoric. Wachs has said the deciding factor in winning business is tangible value: companies report that Footprint increased their conversion rates by as much as 50 percent, or delivered the single biggest fraud improvement they made in a year. Those are the numbers that close enterprise deals in banking, real estate, and auto lending.

The two numbers he means: the roughly 3 percent fraud tax that runs quietly through internet commerce, and the tens of billions lost to identity theft every year. Zero is not a realistic quarterly target, and Wachs knows it. It functions as a direction, a way of orienting a company that could otherwise settle for shaving a few basis points off a fraud rate. He has been candid that founders, himself included, are bad at pausing to appreciate progress. "I don't do this to glorify the lows," he has said of documenting hard moments. "Moreso I keep it as a reminder."

Beyond the balance sheet

Wachs is not only a fintech operator. He founded Tech Fights Dobbs, a coalition of privacy and women's health companies using technology to help protect women - an offshoot of the same conviction that data control is a matter of power, not just convenience. He is, by his own description, a massive Avicii fan and an occasional stand-up comic. His favorite novel is Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, which he admits to quoting too often, including in investor updates.

Investors have backed the mission and the person. Footprint's roughly $20 million in funding, anchored by a $13 million Series A led by QED Investors in May 2024, also includes Index Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Operator Partners, BoxGroup, Neo, and Animal Capital. What they are underwriting is a young CEO with a fixed idea and a long runway of conviction - someone who has been building companies since ninth grade and shows no sign of stopping. The mission he wrote in a dorm room is now a business with enterprise customers, and it still fits in one sentence: put people in control of their data.