The startup that wants to be the last identity form you ever fill out - unifying verification, fraud, auth and secure vaulting behind a single line of code.
Every day the internet asks the same question - prove you are who you say you are - and every day people answer it from scratch. A new bank account, a marketplace signup, a loan application: each one repeats the ritual of typing a name, a birthday, a Social Security number, and waiting to be approved. Footprint, a New York company founded in 2022, was built on a simple frustration with that ritual.
"Every time we verify our identity we go through the same process," the company writes. "This ensuing dance leads to lost revenue, bad actors being let in, and good actors being kept out." Footprint's answer is to make verified identity portable - prove who you are once, then reuse that verification across the products and companies that plug into its network.
Rather than screening out an infinite number of bad actors, Footprint pre-vets the good ones - narrowing the search space instead of chasing every fraudster.
Founded by Eli Wachs and Alex Grinman, Footprint packages what used to be five separate vendor relationships - identity verification, business verification, fraud detection, authentication and secure data storage - into a single platform that a developer can wire up in roughly five lines of code. In May 2024 it raised a $13 million Series A led by QED Investors, bringing total funding to about $19 million, and it has since leaned into AI agents that automate the manual review work behind compliance.
A compound onboarding suite - identity, security, fraud and auth - plus AI agents to run the operations behind them.
Verify consumers and businesses with document scanning, biometric and liveness checks, and a rules engine that automates approve/deny decisions.
A unified rules engine spots duplicate identities and behavioral red flags - like copied form data - that backend tools tend to miss.
Passkey-based authentication and streamlined re-onboarding, so verified users move across a company's products without repeating verification.
AES-256 encrypted data storage inside AWS Nitro secure enclaves, with auto-decryption and zero-trust access - not another leaky database.
AI agents that run your SOPs - pulling data, checking sanctions, assessing risk, and writing the investigation memo in seconds, with explainable decisions.
Lightweight app-clip experiences let users complete high-fidelity onboarding without downloading a full app first.
For years, companies onboarding customers online faced a tradeoff: tighten security and you lose real users to friction; loosen it and you let fraud in. Regulatory scrutiny on fintechs kept rising, and the tools built to catch bad actors struggled to see behavioral signals - like the same identity copied across dozens of applications.
Footprint's thesis is that the tradeoff is a false one. By building a network of authentic, de-duplicated identities, it aims to let good users through quickly while shrinking the space where fraudsters can hide.
Footprint solves identity, security, fraud and auth in about five lines of code - the identity layer to the internet.
Eli Wachs, co-founder and CEO, has been starting companies since high school and studied at Stanford, where he spent time researching identity - work that touched on economist Raj Chetty's research. He describes a philosophy-driven interest in what it means to be authentic.
Alex Grinman, co-founder and CTO, studied computer science, math and cryptography at MIT. He previously built KryptCo, a mobile authentication startup that was acquired by Akamai.
About $19M raised across two rounds, backed by fintech's operator class.
Series A led by QED Investors, with Index Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Operator Partners, BoxGroup, Palm Tree Capital, Definition, Neo and Animal Capital. The seed round drew the founders of Plaid, Ramp, Lattice, MoonPay, Kayak and JumpCloud.
Eli Wachs and Alex Grinman launch Footprint with seed backing from Index Ventures and a roster of fintech founders.
The platform broadens across KYC/KYB, fraud detection, passkey auth and secure vaulting.
Fresh capital to automate consumer onboarding and make identity portable; partnership with Treasury Prime announced.
Footprint launches Percy, an AI-agent suite for investigations and compliance, positioning as an AI-native risk-operations platform.
Footprint is an identity and risk-operations platform that combines KYC, KYB, fraud detection, authentication and encrypted data vaulting so companies can onboard real users with less friction and less fraud.
It was founded in 2022 by Eli Wachs (CEO) and Alex Grinman (CTO), and is headquartered in New York City.
About $19M total, including a $13M Series A led by QED Investors in May 2024, with backing from Index Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and others.
Percy is Footprint's AI-agent product that automates investigations, disputes, reviews and compliance workflows - pulling data, checking sanctions, assessing risk and writing the memo with explainable decisions.
Banks, fintechs, BaaS providers and marketplaces. Named customers include Apiture, DAT, Grid, Triumph, Nuvei, LoanPro and Findings.