The queue was doing its job. That was the trouble. At a Spartan Race in California, people were producing passports and driving licences to establish who they were, then leaving those valuable documents in bags while they went off to tackle obstacles. Robin Tombs and Duncan Francis could see another obstacle before the race had properly begun: the business of getting through registration.
There is something wonderfully bureaucratic about demanding a passport before permitting someone to crawl through mud. Tombs saw a practical problem. A document that could take you across a border was being hauled out for a much smaller question. Afterwards, its owner had to find somewhere to put it. The phone, meanwhile, was already part of everyday life. Why couldn't it carry the proof?
That encounter became part of Yoti's origin story. Founded in 2014 by Tombs, Francis and Noel Hayden, the company set out to put reusable identity on a phone. For Tombs, now its co-founder and CEO, it opened a long argument about how much of ourselves we should have to surrender to establish one small fact.
The accountant had seen the trick before
Tombs arrived at this problem with experience of people pretending. Before Yoti, he had been co-founder and finance director of Gamesys, the online gaming business. Age and identity checks were part of the work. A customer with a plausible name was not necessarily the person whose name appeared on the screen. A matching database entry could look reassuring while answering the wrong question.
His route into technology began in accountancy. Between 1993 and 1997, he worked at PwC in London as a chartered accountant. He and Hayden then co-founded IDM, a web games business sold in 1999. Gamesys followed in 2001. The sequence matters: Tombs had spent years building businesses before asking consumers to entrust him with a digital version of their identity.
In a 2026 conversation with Riley Hughes, he recalled early bingo customers who valued the chat rooms as much as the game. An automatic dabber marked their numbers while they talked. Alongside that sociability came people using somebody else's details and credit card. The cheerful room and the dishonest visitor occupied the same website. Identity was already a business problem with a human face.
A passport knows rather too much
Consider the ordinary indignity of proving your age. The person checking needs a yes or a no. A passport supplies a name, a photograph, a date of birth and other particulars besides. The transaction has asked a small question and received a miniature biography. Tombs's proposition was that useful proof could be separated from the document carrying it.
Yoti's digital wallet lets people share selected verified attributes. Its facial age estimation service tackles a related question through an image: approximately how old does this person appear to be? Those are different processes. A reusable identity account and a standalone age estimate should not be treated as interchangeable simply because both may involve a face.
The distinction is central to understanding his work. Identity verification seeks to establish who someone is. An age threshold check can be satisfied with much less. The appeal of the latter is easy to understand: buying an age-restricted item should not require making a new acquaintance of everyone named on your identification document.
Date of birth
Document details
Yes.
Trust needed somewhere to turn up
A digital identity can be beautifully engineered and still leave its owner with nowhere to use it. Tombs has had to work on both sides of that problem: persuade people to create an account, and persuade organisations to accept it. Nobody wants a splendid new key that opens a door nobody has installed.
The Post Office partnership, announced in 2021, gave the project a familiar public connection. It brought together Yoti's technology, the Post Office EasyID app and in-branch identity services. That last element deserves attention. A plan to improve identity checks has to accommodate people who prefer a counter to a camera, or who cannot complete the process online.
Tombs has described the value of remote identity checks for people applying for work or moving to another part of the country. The benefit is quite physical: fewer journeys made merely to present a document. In his account, trust becomes useful when it removes a small, repeated inconvenience from somebody else's day.
The years before the numbers moved
Patience has been an expensive part of the proposition. By May 2022, Yoti had drawn on more than £110 million from founders and employees, and was looking to raise outside funding. That figure describes money backing the business, rather than a valuation or Tombs's personal fortune. The distinction is useful in a sector already concerned with establishing exactly what a number proves.
There is a long distance between noticing an absurd queue and operating a service that other businesses will rely on. Software has to work; customers need reasons to change; institutions have their own timetables. Yoti's history puts a substantial interval between the founding idea and its more recent commercial progress. A good observation does not come with a delivery date.
In January 2026, Tombs reported revenue of £29 million for 2025, up from £17.9 million in 2024 and £11.5 million in 2023. He also reported that Yoti had been EBITDA profitable each month since March 2025. That is a specific operating measure, and a more precise description than declaring every aspect of the business profitable.
Yoti annual revenue
The awkward part of proving trust
By June 2026, Yoti's reported reach included more than one billion age checks and over 23 million digital ID downloads worldwide. In April, Tombs received the Lifetime Achievement in Age Assurance award at the Global Age Assurance Summit. The recognition arrived twelve years after the founding. It also arrived during a difficult year for the company's privacy argument.
Spain's data protection authority, the AEPD, imposed fines totalling €950,000 relating to Yoti's digital ID app. Its findings concerned biometric processing, consent and data retention. Yoti rejected the decision and appealed to the Spanish High Court. Tombs addressed the dispute publicly in March, defending the app's reliance on biometrics and the choice to use it.
In September, Yoti announced that it would remove the app from Spanish app stores from 10 September while the appeal continued. The company said adapting to its understanding of the decision would mean weakening the biometric protections it regarded as essential. That was Yoti's position in a contested matter. The regulator's findings remain part of the story too.
The dispute exposes the difficult territory Tombs has chosen. People want convenient proof, protection against impersonation and control over sensitive information. Agreement on those goals leaves considerable room for disagreement about implementation. An award can recognise years of work. It cannot settle what a regulator should accept, or what an individual should be asked to consent to.
Two friends, eleven days apart
A different sort of long association runs through ZING. Tombs co-founded the charity with Chris White in 2009. Its own timeline begins in April 1969, when the two were born eleven days and 200 yards apart. They went to school and youth group together, travelled and shared a house. Their eventual foundation grew out of conversations about giving something back.
ZING supports early organisations helping young people realise their potential, combining grants with connections and technology expertise. Its timeline records £4 million invested by April 2021. The approach has a recognisable resemblance to backing a young business: find people doing useful work, supply resources and help them make connections. The outcome being sought is a young person's opportunity.
There is continuity here with Tombs's investing. His publicly listed investments have included Vitesse, Syft, Marshmallow and Infinitesima. In a 2024 post about Vitesse, he described backing its founders with Hayden in 2014, and accepting investment from those same founders into Yoti. Relationships run in both directions. Sometimes the person you back is also the person backing you.
“Things are messy the first time you try and run a business.”
Robin Tombs, Jazz Shapers, 2019
A useful answer, and no more
For someone who has spent so long in technology, Tombs offered a disarming piece of advice to his younger self in 2017: “Learn to code.” He also wished he had sought more consumer feedback earlier in Yoti's development. These are practical regrets, concerned with understanding how things are made and what people actually want to do with them.
His ambition remains expansive. In October 2025, he described wanting hundreds of millions of people to use Yoti once for age estimation, then share proof of age anonymously. He also argued that identity providers would need to form networks. A wallet gains value when its owner has more places to use it. Cooperation, in that account, is part of the product.
Back at the race, the immediate problem had been a line of people waiting to get on with their day. Twelve years later, Tombs's work still returns to that modest irritation. Someone needs to prove a fact. Someone else needs to trust the answer. His wager is that the exchange can become easier, while asking people to reveal less of themselves.