From a chance internship in LA to a $4.6 billion background-check unicorn. The French engineer who took three shots at Y Combinator - and showed up the third time with customers already in hand.
Jonathan Perichon didn't discover the background check problem in a boardroom. He found it at a delivery startup called Deliv, where his CEO handed him an assignment: find a better vendor for background checks. It was 2013. The incumbent solutions were fax machines dressed up with web portals. Slow, opaque, built for an era before the gig economy existed.
He didn't find a better vendor. Six months later, he and his colleague Daniel Yanisse quit their jobs and started building one themselves. That startup became Checkr - now a $4.6 billion platform used by over 100,000 companies, processing background screenings for DoorDash drivers, Lyft drivers, Coinbase employees, and millions of other workers across the United States.
"We didn't go to Stanford. We didn't have fancy resumes. But we still got into YC. It took us 3 tries. By the third, we had already quit our jobs, had customers, and made it very clear: we were doing this with or without YC. That's what got us in. Because YC doesn't care about credentials, they care about grit."- Jonathan Perichon, Co-founder & CTO, Checkr
Perichon grew up in France, studied Computer Science at the Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard, then crossed the Atlantic on what he describes as a chance internship in Los Angeles. He fell in love with American culture and opportunity - and never went back. By the time he met Yanisse at Mogreet, a mobile startup in LA, he was already thinking like a builder, not just an engineer.
The Y Combinator story is the one that tells you who Jonathan Perichon is. Two rejections, each one a reason to quit. Instead, by the third application, he had left his job, had paying customers, and essentially handed YC an ultimatum: this is happening either way. The S14 batch accepted them. Uber, which was also growing rapidly and desperately needed a scalable background check solution, became one of their first major customers.
What happened next was not inevitable. The gig economy was nascent. Regulators were watching. The compliance landscape was shifting. Checkr had to build a product that was fast enough for gig platforms, accurate enough for regulated industries, and equitable enough to survive legal scrutiny under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. That's the part of the Checkr story that doesn't show up in the funding announcements.
Perichon has led the engineering organization through every round - seed to Series E. His unusual characteristic as CTO is that he doesn't pick between technical work and people leadership. He rotates. Some quarters he's deep in architecture decisions. Others he's coaching engineering managers. At a $4.6 billion company with 1,800+ employees, that kind of grounded presence is rarer than it sounds.
"Credentials open doors, execution kicks them down. We chose the latter."
The specific friction that launched Checkr was mundane: Deliv needed to screen gig workers before putting them on delivery routes. Background check vendors in 2013 operated on turnaround times measured in days, sometimes weeks. The APIs - where they existed at all - were fragile. The candidate experience was opaque: you applied for a job, submitted your details, then waited in a black box while a third party decided your fate.
Perichon and Yanisse saw the same problem from two angles simultaneously. As engineers, they saw a systems problem: no modern API layer, no real-time data pipeline, no intelligent adjudication. As humans, they saw a fairness problem: background check outcomes often reflected data quality and bureaucratic delay more than actual risk. Both problems were solvable. They went to work.
"After working for a startup requiring background checks for its users, he saw first-hand how antiquated and slow the process could be - and within 6 months, he and his co-founder set off to build an API-driven solution."- Checkr founding story
Checkr's original insight was that background screening was a data and workflow problem, not a compliance problem. If you built the right API layer, connected to the right data sources, and built an adjudication workflow that was fast and auditable, you could serve a gig economy client at scale. Uber's requirements, at the time, were incompatible with legacy vendor timelines. Checkr made them compatible.
By the time the Series E closed in September 2021 - $250 million at a $4.6 billion valuation, led by Durable Capital Partners with participation from Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, BOND Capital, Khosla Ventures, IVP, T. Rowe Price, Coatue, Accel, and Y Combinator itself - Checkr had evolved into something broader than a background check company. It had added continuous monitoring, global data sources, a candidate-facing portal, expungement services, and tools specifically designed around fair chance hiring: giving people with past records a genuine shot at employment.
Perichon, through all of this, has maintained a particular kind of founder discipline: he doesn't overexplain the mission. The product speaks. The engineering culture he's built at Checkr - where employees rate the executive team an A+ and report strong investment in career growth - reflects someone who leads through environment-setting rather than speeches.
He's spoken publicly about the challenge of being a CTO at scale: the moment when you can no longer write every line of code yourself, and leadership becomes the product. His answer was to stop treating it as a binary. He alternates. The engineers who work for him know he can review their code. That changes how they ship.
Checkr uses AI, machine learning, and real-time data pipelines to modernize a background screening industry that was still running on paper and fax machines when Perichon and Yanisse arrived. The platform handles criminal searches, motor vehicle reports, employment verification, education verification, drug testing, I-9 verification, and continuous monitoring - served through APIs that modern HR systems can plug into directly.
The fair chance angle is not marketing. Checkr built candidate-facing tools that give job seekers transparency into their own reports. They added expungement services. They built adjudication workflows that reduce human bias and discretion at the screening stage. The goal: faster hiring, more equitable outcomes, and compliant processes under FCRA and state-specific regulations across all 50 states.
At $800M+ in annual revenue and 1,800 employees, Checkr is the dominant API-first background screening platform in the United States. Forbes Cloud 100 in 2024. YC Breakthrough Company in 2024. The infrastructure layer for the gig economy's hiring stack.
He moved from France to Los Angeles through a chance internship - and never moved back. San Francisco became home.
YC rejected him twice. By the third application, he had already quit his day job and had paying customers lined up.
He discovered the background check problem because his CEO at Deliv told him to find a better vendor. He built one instead.
He maintains a Medium blog at medium.com/@jperichon and joined Twitter in July 2011 - two years before founding Checkr.
As CTO of a $4.6B company, he still rotates between hands-on technical work and people leadership - refusing to pick just one.
He studied in two countries (France, Canada) before landing in a third (USA) - where he went on to build billion-dollar infrastructure.