Kaarel Kotkas and the trouble with taking people at face value

Kaarel Kotkas wanted to stop picking up string. On his family’s farm on Hiiumaa, the blue twine used to bind hay bales had to be collected afterwards, and the teenager had identified a better arrangement: buy twine that would biodegrade. The internet offered a supplier. Then it asked him to prove he was old enough to place the order.

In his telling, the first attempt failed. He was fourteen. He changed the birth year on a copy of his identification document and tried again. The order went through. A modest agricultural purchase had revealed a rather larger problem: a system could inspect an official-looking picture and remain remarkably incurious about the person behind it.

Years later, Kotkas would build a company around that gap. There is a pleasing inconvenience in the origin story. The future identity-verification founder began by defeating an identity check. His customer research arrived in a parcel.

The cows declined to negotiate

Kotkas grew up in Emmaste, on the Estonian island of Hiiumaa. The family farm had Hereford cattle, sheep and a horse. Work came with a dependable calendar, much of it determined by animals with little interest in whether a schoolboy felt industrious that morning.

He has described farm life as an education in discipline. The lesson was quite concrete: certain jobs had to happen. Later, talking about life in the city, he recalled encountering the Estonian expression for being unable to be bothered. Feeding cows in winter had left little room for that particular negotiating position.

There were projects of his own, too. Wanting a BMX bicycle, he offered to mow the lawns of neighbours who visited the island in summer. Other ventures followed. He was learning to connect a thing somebody needed doing with a thing he wanted to make possible.

Windsurfing took him to Tallinn, where the training facilities were better. In a conversation about the sport, he made his preference clear: speed interested him. He enrolled at the Tallinn Secondary School of Science. Away from the farm’s continuous demands, he found time for computers.

That move matters because it resists the tidy version of a technology career. He went to the capital for a sport. The new setting gave another interest room to develop. A life can acquire its direction through a fairly practical decision about where to sail.

A summer spent testing the lock

By 2013, Kotkas was involved in Sants, a student business connecting young people with short-term jobs. It was named Estonia’s third-best student company in 2014. He also established Bevoke Estonia, an electronics business. Veriff arrived after experience with smaller, more immediate exchanges.

The serious return to identity came through a case study for TransferWise, now Wise. He was asked to test security using false identification. He spent a summer writing code around the problem. In October 2015, Veriff was established; its first product followed in 2016.

The early opportunity involved Estonian e-residents opening bank accounts remotely. That brought a particular challenge into focus. A customer could be entitled to use a service and still have difficulty proving it from a distance. A convincing impostor could exploit the same distance. Both situations demanded better evidence.

Estonia had already made digital identity part of ordinary civic life. Kotkas could see a working example close to home. Building for other countries meant taking the underlying question into places with different documents, institutions and expectations. The familiar Estonian experience was a beginning, with a great deal of translation still ahead.

The colleague worth waiting for

Building the product also meant persuading people to help build the company. Janer Gorohhov, who became Veriff’s co-founder, had already accepted another job when the prospect became serious. The two discussed it over lunch in Tallinn’s Old Town. Gorohhov was uncomfortable breaking a promise; Kotkas wanted him on the team.

Gorohhov joined. Their recollections of the early years include development continuing until five in the morning before a launch with LHV, the Estonian bank. A partnership was taking shape through work that required both of them to stay with the problem.

Kotkas later admitted that he enjoyed doing things himself and getting immediate feedback. Growing the team required accepting that his own day would never get longer. He described the executive title with a refreshing lack of ceremony: “CEO was actually never really the goal for me”.

The observation gives his ambition a practical shape. He wanted the work to happen. Running the organisation became part of that work, even as it put distance between him and the product.

A passport stamp for the business

Veriff joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 batch. The company was taking its Estonian beginnings into a programme built around helping young businesses find customers and grow. Kotkas has since described the experience as a lesson in committing to a market rather than visiting it occasionally.

The footprint widened. Veriff opened a New York office in 2019, followed by London in 2020 and Barcelona in 2021. Geography was becoming an operating question: where the customers were, where the team needed to be, and how a company could serve people carrying documents issued far from its own starting point.

On January 26, 2022, Veriff announced a $100 million Series C, co-led by Tiger Global and Alkeon, with Accel and IVP participating. The round valued the company at $1.5 billion and brought its announced total funding to $200 million. These were figures attached to that financing, a dated milestone in a continuing business.

The funding announcement described plans to invest in research, expand products and reach more customers. A valuation could supply a headline in a few characters. Making the service work across more documents and circumstances would require rather more keystrokes.

The following years also brought harder decisions. In a 2024 fireside conversation, Kotkas discussed navigating a slowdown, managing investor relationships and the experience of two rounds of layoffs in one year. The public story included the cost of changing course as well as the pleasure of expansion.

More evidence, fewer assumptions

Identity verification sounds simple when reduced to two pictures: one on a document, one of a face. Kotkas’s account of the work adds the surrounding evidence. A video contains a sequence. A device and its network provide context. Behaviour during a session can contribute further clues.

In his discussion of artificial intelligence and deception, he has argued for examining information together. A single image offers a narrow view; other signals can help expose what it leaves out. The logic is familiar to anyone who has found a photograph less informative than the circumstances in which it was taken.

His own emphasis has remained unusually direct. In a leadership conversation, he said he preferred a clear rejection to silence. At least a refusal tells you where things stand. Silence leaves another problem to investigate. It is an apt preference for somebody whose company is concerned with getting enough evidence to make a decision.

Recognition followed the business. Kotkas received Estonia’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2020. In 2023, he appeared in Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe and received the Order of the White Star. He also became an angel investor: Lightyear named him among the backers of its early funding round.

In December 2025, Veriff reported profitability, revenue above $100 million and a tripling of verification volumes year over year. Authentication volumes had grown more than thirtyfold. The business was describing demand extending beyond the first moment somebody opened an account, into checking the transactions that followed.

“Estonia gave us an unfair advantage.”

Kaarel Kotkas · Veriff’s tenth-anniversary conversation, 2025

During that television exchange, the interviewer asked what it felt like to run a company described as a unicorn. Kotkas reached for mathematics. The response was consistent with the practical language in his earlier reflections: a business earns its place by solving a problem. The animal in the headline can wait outside while the numbers are discussed.

By May 2026, Kotkas was discussing Estonia’s business environment and Veriff on CNN. Asked about the country’s ability to produce technology companies, he pointed to education, a willingness to innovate and earlier founders whose success had helped finance another generation. His own career had become part of that circulation.

The island is still on the itinerary

The longer ambition is to make trusted identity portable across borders. Kotkas imagines people accessing services through a network of evidence about who they are, with fewer opportunities closed off by geography. It remains an aspiration, and a revealing measure of how far beyond a document check he sees the work extending.

He has other ideas of a satisfying future. In a lighter moment, he entertained opening a car wash, complete with a name built around his own. There is something reassuringly tangible about the proposal. A car arrives dirty; it leaves clean. The outcome is visible from a useful distance.

Hiiumaa also remains important. His parents have joked that too few visits might cost him his islander credentials. He has described the pleasure of the ferry arriving at Heltermaa, and has spoken about buying forest on the island to protect it. He wants more time there.

The farm, the sailboard and the company belong to the same life, even when its calendar makes them difficult to accommodate. The first unwanted chore led him to ask whether a process could work better. Years later, there are still processes to question. There is also a ferry he would like to catch.