background-checks
(19)
TraqCheck checked the résumé. Now it wants to find the person.
After building a business in background checks, TraqCheck is moving into AI recruitment. Its $8 million Series A backs a bet that employers will buy the work, not just another dashboard.
Daniel Yanisse Put Trust Behind an API. Then the Hard Part Began.
A slow background check gave a young robotics engineer an elegant startup idea. Twelve years later, Daniel Yanisse is still working through the gloriously untidy question hidden inside it: how should software decide whom to trust?
They Burned $550,000 Selling Trust. Then The Lifetime Value Co. Learned to Sell Curiosity
Josh Levy and Ross Cohen spent 11 months pitching an identity badge nobody would buy. Their pivot - from asking people to verify themselves to helping customers investigate the world around them - became a portfolio of data products used by millions.
The Company That Reads the Internet So HR Doesn't Have To
Fama built AI that scans 10,000-plus public sources to catch the red flags a resume hides - then convinced the background-check giants to run on its engine.
Players Health
Players Health is a Minneapolis-based sports insurtech that combines a digital risk-management platform with tailored insurance products so youth, amateur and collegiate sports organizations can keep athletes safe and stay compliant. Founded in 2015 by former pro football player Tyrre Burks, the company pairs safety assessments, background checks, incident tracking and HIPAA-compliant education with sports-specific coverage. It supports more than 40,000 sports organizations and over 5.5 million athletes, and in December 2024 closed a $60 million Series C led by Bluestone Equity Partners.
Biometrica (aka Safience)
Biometrica - now operating under the name Safience - is a Las Vegas-based public-safety and identity-intelligence company that helps law enforcement, casinos, schools and critical infrastructure find specific threats and missing victims without watching everyone. Its platform pairs a law-enforcement-only database of verified identities (UMbRA) with edge sensors (RTIS/RVIS) that capture a single still image, purge non-matches immediately, and store no biometric data on the device. The company's pitch is deliberately contrarian for its industry: public safety without mass surveillance, summed up in its tagline 'Being Big Brother Is a Choice.'
TransCrypts
TransCrypts is a blockchain-based digital identity and credential verification company that lets people own and instantly share verified employment, income, education, and health records. Founded in 2020 by cousins Zain Zaidi and Ali Zaheer, it replaces the slow, costly background-check pipeline with permission-based, fraud-proof verification - including JustScreen, billed as the world's first free background check service. Backed by Pantera Capital, Mark Cuban, and others, it serves millions of users and hundreds of enterprises, including Fortune 100 and 500 companies.
Wyly Wade
Wyly Wade is the CEO of Biometrica Systems (also operating as Safience), a Las Vegas and Virginia-based company that links physical and digital information to help prevent crime, identify threats, and recover victims. A self-taught coder who published his first video game at age ten and fixed a bug in Lotus Notes 4 while barely out of his teens, Wade has spent more than two decades at the intersection of biometrics, cybersecurity, and public policy. He helped build biometric standards for the U.S. passport, advised the ICAO on e-passports, and was part of the founding core team behind India's Aadhaar, the largest biometric identity program on Earth. Today he is pushing Biometrica toward a privacy-first, biometric-free model of threat and victim detection.
KarmaCheck
KarmaCheck is an AI-driven background check and credentialing platform that makes employment screening faster, cheaper, and more accurate. Founded in 2019 by LinkedIn co-founder and founding CTO Eric Ly, the company combines real-time identity verification, criminal and credential checks, drug screening, and occupational health into an API-first platform that plugs into the ATS, HRIS, and HCM systems staffing and healthcare teams already use. In 2025 it launched the industry's first MCP server, letting AI agents run verifications through plain-language prompts.
Eric Ly
Eric Ly is a Vietnamese-American entrepreneur and software engineer best known as a founding member and the first CTO of LinkedIn. Born in Saigon and raised in Silicon Valley, he was an early Java engineer at Sun and a product builder at General Magic before helping Reid Hoffman launch LinkedIn in 2002. Today he is co-founder and CEO of KarmaCheck, an AI-forward background check and credentialing company that raised a $45M Series B in 2024, focused on speeding up hiring in healthcare and staffing. Across a 30-year career he has chased one recurring idea: building trust between people online.
Wingspan
Wingspan is a New York-based payroll and management platform built specifically for the 1099 contractor workforce. It automates the full contractor lifecycle - onboarding, W-9 verification, background checks, same-day payments, tax withholding, and automated 1099 filing - and now ships that stack as an embeddable, white-label API (Wingspan Embed) for HR, HCM, and PEO platforms. The company has processed more than $3 billion in contractor payments and counts Teladoc Health and CRU Group among its customers.
Maite Telleria
Maite Muniz Telleria is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Truora Inc., a San Francisco- and Colombia-based startup that helps Latin American businesses verify identities, run background checks, and automate customer engagement via WhatsApp. A former McKinsey consultant turned startup builder, she left corporate strategy to co-found Truora in 2018 alongside Daniel Bilbao, David Cuadrado, and Cesar Pino. Under her product leadership, Truora scaled from a single-country MVP to a multi-country platform serving clients like Bancolombia, Didi, Mercado Libre, and Rappi, raising $15M in a Series A led by Accel and BBVA's Propel fund in 2022. Maite is also an angel investor focused on women-led ventures and a board member of The F Code.
Checkr, Inc.
Checkr is a San Francisco-based HR-tech company that uses AI and a modern API to run background checks at internet speed. Founded in 2014 by Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon out of Y Combinator, it processes screenings for Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, OpenAI and thousands of other employers - and lobbies hard for fair-chance hiring along the way.
Instawork
Instawork is an AI-powered on-demand staffing platform that connects businesses with vetted hourly workers across hospitality, warehousing, food service, retail, and light industrial sectors. Operating in 400+ cities across the U.S. and Canada, the company uses over 2 billion data signals to match businesses with pre-vetted workers, achieving a 98% worker show rate and filling 90% of jobs within 24 hours — metrics that traditional staffing agencies rarely approach. Founded in 2015 and backed by Y Combinator, Benchmark, Greylock, and TCV, Instawork has raised $171M and serves 15,000+ businesses, with a network of 10M+ workers. The platform handles everything from a single catering shift to large-scale distribution center operations.
Cesar Pino
Cesar Pino is the co-founder of Truora Inc., a Y Combinator-backed identity verification and fraud prevention platform built for Latin America. An electronic engineer with a specialization in cryptography from Universidad del Valle in Colombia, Pino previously worked as a fullstack engineer at Twilio before co-founding Truora in 2018 with Daniel Bilbao, David Cuadrado, and Maite Muniz Telleria. Truora helps companies across 9+ Latin American countries onboard users digitally through background checks, facial recognition, KYC/AML compliance, and WhatsApp-powered customer engagement - serving clients like Rappi, Bancolombia, Mercado Libre, and Uber. The company has raised ~$40M in total funding including a $15M Series A led by BBVA's Propel fund and Accel.
Daniel Bilbao
Daniel Bilbao is the co-founder and CEO of Truora Inc., a San Francisco-based identity verification and digital onboarding platform serving Latin America. Born in Cali, Colombia, Bilbao studied electronic engineering at Universidad de los Andes and earned an MBA from Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth before stints at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Silicon Valley startups. He founded Truora in 2018 alongside David Cuadrado, Maite Muniz Telleria, and Cesar Pino, solving a problem he knew firsthand: background checks in Latin America took up to three weeks. Truora compresses that to under 20 seconds. The company has raised ~$40M in total funding including a $15M Series A led by Accel and BBVA's Propel fund in 2022, grew revenue to $32.1M in 2024, reached break-even, and expanded to seven countries. Beyond Truora, Bilbao co-founded Colombia Tech Week and the B2 Founders seed fund with his brother Andres Bilbao, co-founder of Rappi.
Jonathan Perichon
Jonathan Perichon is the Co-founder and CTO of Checkr, Inc., a San Francisco-based AI-powered background screening platform he co-founded in 2014 with Daniel Yanisse. A French-born software engineer who discovered the gig economy's broken background check infrastructure while working at an LA startup, Perichon turned that frustration into a $4.6 billion company serving over 100,000 clients including DoorDash, Lyft, Coinbase, and Uber. A Y Combinator S14 alumnus who applied three times before getting in, he embodies the principle that persistence and execution beat credentials every time.
Truora Inc.
Truora is a Latin America-focused identity and customer engagement platform that helps companies verify users, run background checks, and onboard customers - largely through WhatsApp. Founded in 2018 by Twilio and McKinsey alumni and backed by Y Combinator, Accel, and Propel, it powers KYC and fraud prevention for Rappi, Bancolombia, Mercado Libre, Didi, and hundreds of other LatAm businesses.
Zain Zaidi
Zain Zaidi is the co-founder and CEO of TransCrypts, a blockchain-powered credential and employment verification platform he started after struggling to access his own college transcript as an SJSU student. Backed by Mark Cuban, Pantera Capital, and Techstars, he has grown the company to 450+ enterprise clients and 4 million users across 9 countries, raised $18M+, launched JustScreen (the world's first free background check service), and earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2026 — all before turning 30. His platform has also helped over 4,000 Ukrainian refugees access medical records.