Sukhmeet
Toor

A career about trust between strangers

Sukhmeet Toor works in the leadership office at ID.me, the company that stands between you and the IRS, the state unemployment office, and a growing list of retailers. When you log in to file taxes or claim a benefit and a screen asks you to verify your identity, ID.me is often the machinery doing the checking. It is unglamorous, high-stakes plumbing. A false negative locks a real person out of money they are owed. A false positive lets fraud through. Toor spends his days on that tradeoff.

This is a strange place to end up for someone whose most public success was in matchmaking. Before identity verification, Toor co-founded Dil Mil, a dating app for the South Asian diaspora. The pitch was specific: a middle ground for people who wanted neither the disposable churn of Tinder nor the family-brokered logistics of an arranged marriage. It worked. At its peak the company reported more than five million matches and, by its own accounting, something close to a wedding a day.

The two problems look unrelated. They are not. Both are the same question wearing different clothes: how do you get two strangers to trust each other, at scale, through a screen? A dating app has to convince you that the person on the other end is real, is who they claim to be, and is worth your time. An identity system has to convince a government agency that the person filing a claim is a real human and not a script running someone else's stolen data. Toor has now worked both sides of that problem.

The path there ran through big companies first. Toor earned a computer science degree from the University of Toronto Mississauga, the Erindale campus, between 2002 and 2006. He then spent years at Microsoft as an engineering manager working on Outlook for Mac, which is to say his software quietly reached millions of desktops before he ever ran a startup. That is a useful apprenticeship. Shipping email client software for a platform the company does not own teaches you patience, edge cases, and the particular humility of maintaining something people only notice when it breaks.

Dil Mil started, as many companies do, with a chance meeting. Toor met his co-founder, KJ Dhaliwal, at a Google event in Mountain View. They founded the company in 2014, raised a Pre-Series A round of roughly $2.7 million in 2016, and built a machine-learning matching engine that pulled signals from user behavior and connected social profiles. The company positioned itself less as a hookup app and more as a marriage-adjacent one, which is a harder product to build because the success metric is not engagement but exit: the best outcome is that your best users leave, happily, and never come back.

The Jewish dating app

Here is the detail that makes Toor interesting rather than just competent. In 2017, he and Dhaliwal launched Shalom, a Jewish dating app, built on top of the Dil Mil platform. Toor is a Sikh. The logic was not sentimental; it was structural. He and his co-founder had noticed that the South Asian and Jewish communities they were serving shared a set of traits that happen to be excellent for a marriage-minded dating product: a strong emphasis on family, a high value placed on education, and a cultural seriousness about marriage itself. If the same engine could serve one such community, it could serve another. So they reused it.

That is founder pattern-matching in its purest form. Most people would see a South Asian dating app and conclude the founder's edge was being South Asian. Toor concluded the edge was the product, and that the product was portable to any community with the right values. Whether or not Shalom became a lasting business, the move tells you how he thinks: the insight travels, the demographics are interchangeable.

Dil Mil was acquired by Dating.com in 2019. Toor did not use the exit as an off-ramp. He went on to engineering work at Meta and at Pencil Spaces, an education-technology company, before landing in digital identity. Along the way he has become involved with Actual AI, a young company building tools for a problem that did not exist a few years ago: how do you manage an engineering team when part of that team is not human? Actual AI's premise is that engineering managers now oversee a mix of people and AI agents that run around the clock, and that the old management tooling was not designed for that org chart. It is, again, a trust problem, just aimed at a stranger kind of stranger.

What unifies the resume is not an industry. Toor has been in email software, dating, social, education, and identity. What unifies it is a single technical and human obsession: building the connective tissue that lets people who have never met transact, match, or verify each other without getting burned. It is the infrastructure of the internet nobody thanks you for until it fails, which may be exactly why an engineer who managed Outlook for Mac feels at home in it.

His public footprint is thin, which fits. His GitHub account, under the handle toorsukhmeet, keeps no public repositories. He is not a personality-first founder posting hot takes; he is an operator who has spent twenty years shipping foundational systems and letting the products do the talking. In an industry that rewards noise, there is something clarifying about a builder whose loudest artifact is a wedding count.