Ricardo
Amper

There is a version of Incode Technologies that never exists. In that version, Cambridge Analytica's 2016 data scandal doesn't shut down Facebook developer access, Ricardo Amper's original social identity startup keeps running on Mark Zuckerberg's graph, and nobody ever builds what is now the world's most deployed biometric verification platform. Lucky for the 4 billion people whose identities Incode has since verified, that version didn't happen.

Amper had founded Incode in San Francisco in 2015 with a clear idea: use Facebook data to build a social layer for identity verification. Two years of work, two years of platform development, two years of teaching machines to read faces and documents. Then the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit, and overnight, Facebook's developer ecosystem shut down. No data access. No fallback plan. And almost no runway.

Instead of folding, Amper looked at what he had. Two years of ID recognition technology sat in a codebase that had been built for a consumer product but could serve a far larger market: the enterprise need for secure, frictionless identity verification. Banks, telecoms, governments, marketplaces - every industry that needed to know who was on the other side of a screen. He pivoted, rebuilt, and kept building through years of critics telling him the company would go bankrupt.

The full picture of what Amper built is visible in a single pair of numbers: Incode raised a $25 million Series A in March 2021, and by December of that same year had closed a $220 million Series B led by General Atlantic and SoftBank Latin America Fund - with J.P. Morgan, Capital One Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures joining the round. The valuation landed at $1.25 billion. Seven months, start to unicorn.

That growth didn't come from nowhere. The company's revenues had grown 6x in the 12 months before the raise. Incode had already become the identity backbone for Citi's Latin American operations, for Brazilian neobank Nubank, for Ford Credit, for Rappi, for Telefónica. Governments across multiple countries were using its technology to verify citizens. The platform had crossed the threshold from promising startup to critical infrastructure.

Ricardo Amper grew up in Mexico City in a business-oriented household. His father was his first mentor, giving him a programming book at age 7 and - perhaps more importantly - inviting him to sit in on every business meeting starting at age 13. By the time Amper was 19, he had founded La Burbuja Networks, a social media platform that predated Facebook. It didn't survive. But it established a pattern: Amper moves early, builds fast, and takes the long view on what technology can do before anyone else recognizes the market.

After completing a degree in Business Administration at ITAM - one of Mexico's most rigorous universities - and additional diplomas at IPADE and NEOMA Business School, Amper co-founded AMCO Foods, a functional beverage company. It scaled into a major market contender and was eventually acquired by Grupo Bimbo, the world's largest baked goods conglomerate. Exit one.

He then turned to his family's chemical distribution business, Amco Group, and did something that most people in commodity distribution wouldn't think to do: he rebuilt it around big data and machine learning, positioning it as the "Bloomberg of Aroma Chemicals." That transformation attracted the attention of Brenntag Group - a $15 billion global chemical distribution conglomerate. Exit two. Somewhere in between, he also founded Cervecería de la República, a craft beer company in Mexico.

By the time he arrived in San Francisco in 2015 to start Incode, Amper was already a two-exit entrepreneur with a manufacturing background, a data science track record, and a very specific instinct for what digitization could do to industries still operating on paper processes.

Amper built Incode with three co-founders: Jovan Jovanovic, a Serbian mathematician and computer specialist; Alex Golunov, a Russian expert in facial recognition systems; and Mariana Amper, his sister, a finance specialist. The combination of machine learning depth, computer vision expertise, and financial rigor gave the company a technical and operational foundation that most identity startups simply couldn't match.

The founding team's academic and technical pedigrees proved critical during the post-Cambridge Analytica pivot. Rather than starting from scratch in the enterprise market, they had two years of real-world training data, working models, and hard-won experience with the precise friction points in the identity verification workflow - the places where documents blur, where liveness detection fails, where manual review creates bottlenecks. That institutional knowledge became the moat.

By 2019, the World Economic Forum had recognized Incode as a Technology Pioneer - a designation given to companies shaping the future of global systems. Amper began contributing to WEF's agenda on digital identity, democracy, and the role of AI in building trustworthy societies.

In 2025, Incode launched DeepSight - an on-device SDK that inspects phone signals and media in real time to detect AI-manipulated deepfake video calls. The platform uses transformer models to analyze video, motion, and depth data during live calls, flagging synthetic media before a financial transaction or identity handshake completes. In a world where anyone with a laptop and an open-source model can generate a convincing synthetic face, DeepSight is the technical countermeasure Amper spent a decade building toward.

That same year, Incode acquired AuthenticID, expanding its AI-driven fraud detection capabilities. The acquisition wasn't a trophy move - it reflected Amper's view that the identity problem is becoming harder, not easier, as AI lowers the cost of fraud while simultaneously raising the sophistication of attacks.

Amper has framed this moment as existential for digital trust. In remarks at Davos and in World Economic Forum contributions, he has argued that reusable digital identity - verified once, trusted everywhere - is not just a product category but a prerequisite for inclusive economies and functioning democracies. "Our job is to take this weak link and bring this technology into 2025," he told audiences at industry conferences, referring to the gap between paper-document identity systems and the demands of a digital-first world.

Incode's Omni platform - an orchestration layer for digital identity - now sits at the center of that vision, enabling enterprises to compose and sequence identity verification workflows across biometrics, document verification, liveness detection, KYC, AML screening, and watchlist monitoring.

In February 2026, Fortune ran a story on Amper's hiring philosophy that stopped a lot of people in their tracks. He actively prefers hiring Gen Z workers - not in spite of their inexperience but because of it. His argument: people who have spent a decade building knowledge in a specific domain carry cognitive baggage. They know why something "can't be done." They reach for familiar solutions. In a field moving as fast as AI and identity, that bias is a liability.

Young people, by contrast, haven't yet been told what the constraints are. They look at a problem fresh. That naivety - the same quality that lets 19-year-olds build social networks before Facebook exists - turns out to be a feature, not a bug. Amper should know. He was that 19-year-old.

His framework for evaluating people isn't credentials. It's character. Grit. The demonstrated ability to stay the course when a company is told repeatedly it won't survive. He has lived that test - through the Cambridge Analytica shutdown, through years of skeptical investors, through the grinding technical challenge of building accurate biometric systems across hundreds of device types, lighting conditions, and document formats. The people he wants around him are the ones who would have stayed through all of that.

He also credits the book "Now Discover Your Strengths" (Gallup) as a philosophical touchstone - building a team by leaning into what each person does exceptionally rather than trying to correct weaknesses. A builder's framework applied to people management.