Luis
Balmaseda

Running the Room at Incode

There is a specific kind of person every fast-growing company eventually needs: someone who can hold the CEO's agenda, read a room mid-meeting, absorb ten competing priorities, and convert all of it into decisions that actually move. Luis Bujan Balmaseda is that person at Incode. As Chief of Staff to CEO Ricardo Amper, he operates at the exact intersection of strategy and execution - the place where ideas either become real or dissolve into the calendar.

Incode is not a company you describe with general phrases. It is the identity verification platform that 8 of the 10 largest banks in the United States depend on to know whether the person opening an account is who they claim to be. It is the system checking for deepfakes when a telecom carrier activates a new SIM. It is the liveness detection engine that earned a 0% error rate in iBeta Level 3 biometric testing - the first platform on earth to do that on both iOS and Android simultaneously. Luis has been part of this story since October 2020, when most people still filed "liveness detection" under "science fiction."

From Mexico City to Mission Street

Luis grew up in Mexico and studied Industrial Engineering at Universidad Iberoamericana in Ciudad de Mexico - a Jesuit university in the Santa Fe district where systems thinking is embedded into the curriculum before lunch. Industrial engineering is fundamentally the discipline of making processes work at scale, of finding inefficiency and removing it, of designing systems that hold under pressure. It is, in retrospect, exactly the training for someone who would spend their career making a CEO's office function.

He added an international dimension with a Business Management and Administration program at Universidad Complutense de Madrid - one of Europe's oldest universities, founded in 1499. Between Mexico City and Madrid, Luis built the kind of cross-cultural fluency that plays differently when you are coordinating across Incode's offices spanning multiple continents and 25+ nationalities.

Before Incode, Luis spent time at Azure Knowledge Corporation as a Project Auditor and Coordinator, and then completed a traineeship at Ford Motor Company. Ford, like Incode, is a company built on trust between complex systems and large numbers of humans - just measured in vehicles rather than biometric profiles. The trainee path at a company that size teaches something specific: how to operate inside bureaucracy without becoming one.

Joining Incode at the Inflection Point

Luis joined Incode in October 2020 as Junior Chief of Staff. To understand the significance of that timing: the world was navigating a pandemic-driven acceleration of digital identity requirements. Every institution that had relied on in-person verification was scrambling to do it remotely. The demand for what Incode built was not theoretical - it was immediate and urgent. He walked in during a sprint that never really stopped.

He progressed quickly through the roles - Junior Chief of Staff, then Associate Chief of Staff, then Chief of Staff to the CEO. Each transition reflected something that does not show up on job descriptions: the ability to earn trust in an environment where the CEO's proximity is both an asset and a daily test. You either get better at the job or you become noise.

In December 2021, Incode raised its $220 million Series B - the largest funding round at that stage in the identity verification sector at the time. Luis was inside that moment, managing the chaos of a company changing shape overnight. Post-round, Incode moved from startup energy to enterprise discipline, from 100 to 600+ employees. That transition does not happen without people like Luis who operate in the CEO's office and make sure strategy actually lands.

The AuthenticID Acquisition - August 2025

When Incode announced the acquisition of AuthenticID in August 2025, Luis was among the first to share the news publicly. That is not a small signal. In most companies, M&A announcements are handled by communications teams and timed to the millisecond. When a Chief of Staff amplifies the announcement with visible personal enthusiasm, it says something about alignment - about someone who actually believes in the direction the company is moving.

The AuthenticID deal was significant. It brought together two AI-driven identity platforms to create what Incode called "a global AI powerhouse" for fraud prevention. AuthenticID had deep enterprise roots - particularly in government and financial services. The combination extended Incode's reach into sectors where trust requirements are not just compliance checkboxes but genuine national security concerns. Running point on integrating two companies of that complexity is exactly the kind of work a Chief of Staff becomes essential for.

What the Role Actually Requires

The Chief of Staff role is often misunderstood from the outside. It sounds like a sophisticated assistant. It is not. At a company like Incode - growing at 80% year-on-year organically, operating across financial services, healthcare, telecom, government, and gaming - the Chief of Staff is the CEO's second set of eyes, the person who asks the questions the CEO does not have time to ask, and the person who makes sure the answers actually travel back to the right people.

Luis manages direct reports within the Executive Administration team. He is part of a small group at the center of Incode's leadership structure. His Industrial Engineering background is not decorative - it informs how he thinks about processes, bottlenecks, and the difference between a system that works and a system that looks like it works.

Incode's Technical Edge - and Why It Matters

The platform Luis supports is not a simple compliance tool. Incode's Deepsight technology uses multi-layer defense against synthetic identities and deepfakes - increasingly important as AI-generated fakes become indistinguishable from real humans to the naked eye. The liveness detection engine achieved a 0% error rate in iBeta Level 3 PAD testing under ISO/IEC 30107-3. That standard exists precisely because the stakes are high enough that "almost never fails" is not good enough.

Incode has won 19 G2 badges in Winter 2026 across Identity Verification, Age Verification, and Anti-Money Laundering categories. It has been a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for two consecutive years. These are not marketing numbers - they reflect what happens when customers repeatedly choose and renew a platform. The retention rate of 8 out of 10 top US banks is the kind of metric that builds unicorn valuations.

The Operator Profile

Luis Bujan Balmaseda fits a specific archetype that Silicon Valley both underestimates and quietly depends on: the operator who makes the founder's vision executable. Ricardo Amper founded Incode on June 17, 2015 with a specific thesis about digital identity. More than a decade later, that thesis has compounded into 4.1 billion annual identity checks, a $1.25B+ valuation, and a team spanning 25+ nationalities. None of that happens without a layer of operational discipline underneath the vision.

Operators like Luis rarely end up on the "founders" list or the splashy announcement. They end up in the room when the decisions happen. They hold the room together when the decisions are hard. They make sure that what gets decided on Monday is actually happening by Thursday. That is the work. And at Incode's current trajectory, the work is considerable.

He is based in San Francisco - Mission Street, specifically, at the address that puts Incode within walking distance of some of the most consequential financial institutions on the West Coast. The location is deliberate. Trust is a proximity business, even when the technology works at light speed.