identity-infrastructure
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Florian Forster Is Making the Login Box Carry Its Weight
A vehicle-electronics apprentice became an identity-infrastructure founder by refusing to treat authentication as a finished problem. Now Florian Forster is taking a Swiss-born open-source company to San Francisco - notifications, trade-offs and all.
Footprint
Footprint is a New York-based identity and risk-operations company that unifies KYC, KYB, fraud detection, authentication, and secure data vaulting into a single platform for banks, fintechs, and marketplaces. Founded in 2022 by Eli Wachs and Alex Grinman, it aims to make verified identity portable across the internet - so a person proves who they are once and reuses that verification everywhere - while using AI agents (its Percy product) to automate manual fraud and compliance review.
Eli Wachs
Eli Wachs is the co-founder and CEO of Footprint, a New York identity verification company building what he calls the identity layer for the internet. Footprint helps banks, real estate firms, auto dealers, and other businesses onboard customers by automating KYC and fraud checks while storing personal data inside secure enclaves. A Stanford economics and history graduate and former General Atlantic investor, Wachs started the company in 2022 with CTO Alex Grinman and has raised roughly $20 million to pursue a blunt goal: reduce digital identity theft toward zero while giving people more control over their own data.