Incode

Who they are now

The world's most important handshake happens in 1.5 seconds

Somewhere right now, a first-time banking customer in Mexico City is holding a phone to their face. A hotel guest in Dubai is checking in without touching a front desk. A teenager is trying to access an online casino with a borrowed ID. And somewhere in a server rack, Incode's AI is making the call - in under two seconds - on who is real and who isn't.

The company doing that verification is not a household name. It should be. Incode is a San Francisco-based AI identity platform that has quietly become the infrastructure layer for how the modern world decides who's who. More than 100 million user verifications per year. A 98% first-try success rate. A $1.25 billion valuation backed by General Atlantic, SoftBank, and J.P. Morgan. And a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader designation for identity verification - two years in a row.

Not bad for a company that started with one founder, one question, and a desk in San Francisco in 2015.

Numbers from Incode's public disclosures. The fraud figure is for customers' accounts, not Incode's own books. Turns out preventing $170M in fraud annually doesn't quite make the headlines it deserves.

The problem they saw

Identity fraud is not a bug in the system. It is the system.

Before Incode existed, the standard approach to identity verification was a mix of password fields, knowledge-based questions ("What was your childhood pet's name?"), and scanned document uploads that sat in a compliance queue for three business days. The results were predictable: fraudsters with slightly more patience than legitimate users, and legitimate users with slightly less.

The numbers underneath that system were, and remain, brutal. Synthetic identity fraud - where criminals construct entirely fictional people from real data scraps - is the fastest-growing financial crime in the United States. Deepfake attacks on identity verification systems increased sharply through the early 2020s. Meanwhile, the cost of friction for legitimate users wasn't abstract: abandoned onboarding flows, lost customers, and, in healthcare or government contexts, people denied services they actually needed.

The problem was not that verification was too hard for fraudsters. The problem was that it was too hard for everyone - and the fraud still got through anyway.

The founders' bet

One question. One company. Ten years.

Ricardo Amper, a serial entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience building fast-growth companies, founded Incode Technologies on June 17, 2015 in San Francisco. His co-founder Jovan Jovanovic joined early. The founding bet was simple and, at the time, contrarian: that biometrics - facial recognition, liveness detection, document analysis - could be made fast enough, accurate enough, and cheap enough to replace the patchwork of passwords and paper the world was using.

What Amper called "One Identity Everywhere" was less a product vision than a philosophical wager. Identity, he argued, should be something you carry in your face, not in a folder of documents. And verification should feel like nothing at all - a fraction of a second that happens invisibly, and then you're in.

The market took its time agreeing. Incode spent its early years working through enterprise pilots in Latin America, building out the biometric stack from scratch using in-house AI rather than third-party models. That decision - to own the underlying technology rather than resell someone else's - is what produced the differentiated accuracy Incode can now point to, and what produced the IP portfolio that makes investors write $220 million checks.

Ten years of trust

The milestone timeline

The product

50 modules. One platform. Zero excuses for fraud.

Incode Omni is the company's flagship identity platform - a modular system with more than 50 verification tools that enterprises can configure, stack, and deploy however they need. Cloud. On-premise. Hybrid. Wherever the compliance team wants the data to live, Incode can put it there.

The core workflow is what you'd expect: document verification, biometric facial matching, liveness detection. But the depth goes further. Incode handles perpetual KYC - continuous monitoring of existing customers rather than a one-time onboarding check. It screens watchlists for AML compliance. It verifies businesses (Know Your Business, eKYB) not just individuals. It can confirm identity without documents at all, using biometric matching against government databases where that's permitted.

And then there's DeepSight - the piece of the platform aimed squarely at the deepfake problem. In 2025, Incode's anti-spoofing technology passed iBeta Level 3 testing on both iOS and Android. That level of testing is rare enough that it's worth saying plainly: almost no competitor has cleared it.

The proof

Customers, analysts, and the occasional bank

The customer list is not long on names Incode volunteers publicly - enterprise identity is a competitive and confidential business - but what's on the record is telling. American Express. Citibanamex. RappiBank. Financial institutions don't run biometric identity verification through vendors they haven't stress-tested.

Sectors served include financial services, retail, hospitality, healthcare, igaming, government, events, and telecom. The use cases range from bank account onboarding (where fraud risk is highest) to hotel check-in (where the goal is speed) to hospital admissions (where the stakes are a patient record attached to the wrong person).

Gartner's analysts placed Incode in the Leaders quadrant of the Identity Verification Magic Quadrant in consecutive years - a distinction shared with a short list of vendors in a field crowded with contenders. The specific citation: most complete vision around identity verification. The analyst community rarely says that without a fair amount of product actually delivered.

Partnerships matter at this scale. The Okta integration in 2025 moved Incode's biometrics into workforce identity - not just customer-facing onboarding but the internal security layer that enterprises use to manage their own employees. AWS and Microsoft Azure integrations put Incode accessible from inside the cloud stacks where most enterprise software already lives. The Interac partnership brought Incode into the Canadian payments infrastructure.

The investor list reads like a who's-who of people who have seen what identity fraud costs - and decided to back the company trying to stop it.

The mission

One Identity Everywhere - and the people who built it

Incode's stated mission is to make trust scalable, secure, and invisible. That last word - invisible - is doing the most work. The goal is not to make identity verification more impressive. It's to make it feel like nothing at all. A fraction of a second that happens, and then you get to do whatever you came to do.

"One Identity Everywhere" is how Ricardo Amper articulates the vision: a world where your biometric identity works seamlessly across every service, every country, every platform - without you having to carry documents, remember passwords, or worry about what happens to your data. Users retain control. Enterprises get compliance. Fraudsters get a much harder problem to solve.

The team making this happen is 600+ people across 25+ nationalities, spanning six continents. The culture Incode describes around it: excellence, empathy, diversity, growth, innovation. Standard values language, until you consider the operating context - a company building AI systems that make irreversible decisions about real identities, in real time, for real consequences. Getting that right actually requires all of the above.

Why it matters tomorrow

Deepfakes. AI agents. The arms race that never stops.

The identity verification industry is not static. It is, in fact, in a continuous adversarial competition - and the other team has access to the same AI tools as the defenders. Deepfake attacks on identity systems accelerated through the early 2020s and show no sign of slowing. Synthetic identity fraud creates people who do not exist but have impeccable financial histories. AI agents now act autonomously on behalf of companies and individuals in ways that no identity infrastructure was designed to handle.

Incode's product responses to these challenges are telling. DeepSight for deepfakes. Agentic Identity for autonomous AI actors. The acquisition of AuthenticID to bolster the fraud detection stack. The OpenAge Initiative for privacy-preserving age checks. None of these are incremental feature releases. Each one is a response to a threat vector that didn't exist, or didn't scale, when Incode was founded.

The Middle Eastern expansion - a regional HQ in Dubai, aimed at the $2.8 billion identity market in the UAE and Saudi Arabia - is another form of forward positioning. Government-led digital transformation in those markets is moving faster than in most Western countries. Incode is there already.

• DeepSight cleared iBeta Level 3 - the highest published liveness testing standard in the industry
• Agentic Identity extends verification to AI agents operating without human oversight
• AuthenticID acquisition (August 2025) strengthens AI-based fraud signal detection
• OpenAge Initiative membership brings privacy-first age assurance to the platform
• Dubai HQ targets UAE and Saudi Arabia digital transformation programs
• Okta partnership embeds Incode into enterprise workforce identity stacks
• ARR CAGR exceeding 100% since 2021, per analyst estimates

Closing scene

Back to that face on the screen

The first-time banking customer in Mexico City holds their phone up. The Incode AI runs its check: document scan, liveness detection, facial biometric match. One and a half seconds. The customer is real. The account opens. No paper, no queue, no fraud.

That is the handshake Incode has been building since 2015 - not the impressive one, the invisible one. The one where you do not notice the technology because it works, and because it works you get on with your life.

The world creates roughly 250,000 new digital accounts per day. A meaningful fraction of the people trying to open those accounts are not who they claim to be. The fraction who are legitimate deserve a better experience than "upload a selfie and wait three business days." Incode has spent a decade arguing, with its product, that both problems are solvable at the same time.

The data suggests they are correct. The market, for once, appears to agree.

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