identity-verification
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Greg Brown Has Spent 20 Years Making Bad Data Everyone's Business
At Melissa, an English graduate with a law degree turned addresses, duplicates and returned mail into a durable marketing brief: make the invisible cost of bad information impossible to ignore.
Ashley Kiolbasa Is Selling the Internet Its Missing Ingredient: Trust
After a career spent translating cybersecurity, ecommerce fraud and frictionless checkout, Prove's CMO has arrived at the question underneath them all: in an AI-shaped internet, how does a business know who - or what - is on the other side?
Oluwatobiloba Ololade Is Building the Boring Layer the Internet Cannot Live Without
The Dojah co-founder turned a developer’s recurring nuisance - fragmented access to identity data - into infrastructure for businesses that need to know who is really on the other side of a screen.
Alberto Rosas Is Building Trust for an Internet Full of Doubles
An identical twin who once competed at tennis and trained neural networks now runs live identity checks for a living. His second act is a study in narrowing the problem without shrinking the ambition.
Johnny Ayers Is Still Punting Into the Unknown
He fumbled the snap in his first college game, ran out of startup money four times, and kept moving forward. Fourteen years into Socure, Johnny Ayers is widening his bet on who - and what - the internet can trust.
Vijay Balasubramaniyan Is Teaching Machines to Hear the Lie
A declined credit card sent a Georgia Tech researcher hunting for truth in the noise. Fifteen years later, his old question - who is really speaking? - has become the defining riddle of synthetic media.
Chirag Bakshi Built a Career on the Signals Hiding in Plain Sight
From telephone switches and Apple printers to mobile identity, the Zumigo founder has spent four decades turning quiet infrastructure into practical trust.
Chaitanya Sarda Is Turning Compliance Into a Product Problem
After years deciding whether unknown callers could be trusted at Google, the AiPrise co-founder is applying the same systems instinct to a slower, messier question: how businesses decide whom to let in.
Akhil Bhiwal
He got tired of hunting down his own income across YouTube, Substack and crypto wallets at tax time. So he built the plumbing that lets any app pull a creator's data from one place.
Rushabh Shah
Rushabh Shah is the co-founder and co-CEO of AiPrise, a Y Combinator-backed (S22) global compliance platform that lets companies verify customers and businesses in more than 150 countries through a single interface. A former Meta engineer who worked on developer-focused products and payments, he started AiPrise in 2022 with Chaitanya Sarda after a weekend scramble to make a YC deadline. The company has raised roughly $14.6M, including a $12.5M Series A led by Headline in October 2025, and serves 150+ customers including Bridge (a Stripe company) and dLocal.
Will Lawrence
Will Lawrence is the co-founder and CEO of Bretton AI, the San Francisco company formerly known as Greenlite AI that builds AI agents for financial crime and compliance operations. After leading anti-money laundering product work at Facebook/Meta and building compliance infrastructure at Paxos, he started the company in 2023 to automate the slow, manual investigative work behind KYC, AML and sanctions checks. In February 2026 the company rebranded to Bretton AI and raised a $75 million Series B led by Sapphire Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $90 million, with customers including Robinhood, Mercury, Ramp, Gusto and a set of OCC-, FDIC- and Federal Reserve-regulated banks.
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.
Jeff Maynard
Jeff Maynard is the founder, president, and CEO of Biometric Signature ID, the Texas company behind BioSig-ID, a software-only biometric password that people draw with a finger or mouse instead of typing. He conceived the idea while running a publicly traded biometrics firm and funded its development for two years before launching the company with his wife Cindy in 2007. His gesture biometrics technology has been used tens of millions of times across 95 countries, holds multiple U.S. patents, and was selected by the White House to pilot the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace.
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.
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.
Andre Ferraz
Andre Ferraz is the co-founder and CEO of Incognia, a Palo Alto-based privacy-first location identity company that uses passive behavioral signals - where your phone goes, how it moves, what Wi-Fi networks it trusts - to verify users without passwords or biometric friction. Before Incognia, Ferraz co-founded In Loco Media in 2011 at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, building it into a company that mapped 6 million indoor venues and captured 250 billion location data points monthly, before selling it to Brazilian retail giant Magazine Luiza in 2020. With Incognia, he pivoted that location intelligence from advertising into fraud prevention, raising $46.5M total (including a $31M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners in 2024), deploying technology on over 200 million smartphones, and pioneering what he calls zero-factor authentication - security that works without the user doing anything at all.
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.
Dan Calpin
Dan Calpin is a senior technology executive and founder who has spent his career at the intersection of AI, media, and enterprise strategy. As Founding Partner and General Manager of Bain Media Lab, he co-created Mensio, an AI-powered analytics platform measuring TV advertising and sponsorships. He went on to serve as President of Hive, the enterprise AI company specializing in content understanding, and later as EVP North America at Incode Technologies. He is currently launching a new stealth AI venture.
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.
Kurt Ruppel
Kurt Ruppel is the Co-Founder and CTO of Middesk, the business identity platform that helps financial institutions, fintechs, and marketplaces verify and onboard businesses in seconds rather than weeks. A UC Berkeley cognitive science alumnus turned engineer, he built his technical chops at Zendesk and Checkr before co-founding Middesk with Kyle Mack in 2018. The company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch, secured a $4M seed led by Accel and Sequoia before Demo Day ended, and raised a $57M Series B in 2022—bringing total funding to over $77M. Ruppel leads Middesk's technical vision, focusing on primitives and forward concepts that transform raw business data into actionable intelligence for the financial ecosystem.
Kyle Mack
Kyle Mack is the CEO and Co-founder of Middesk, the business identity platform that's modernizing how financial institutions and fintechs verify and trust the companies they work with. Founded in 2018 after Mack witnessed firsthand the painful manual process of customer credentialing at Checkr, Middesk has grown into a category-defining KYB infrastructure company backed by Sequoia Capital, Accel, Insight Partners, and Canapi Ventures with $77M+ in total funding. The company serves hundreds of enterprise clients - including two of the top three U.S. banks and fintechs like Plaid, Affirm, Brex, and Shopify - by connecting to roughly 400 U.S. government agencies to surface real-time business identity intelligence. Mack is also a Sequoia Scout, investing in early-stage founders.
Maxwell Blumenfeld
Maxwell Blumenfeld is the Co-Founder, COO, and Head of R&D at SentiLink, a San Francisco-based identity verification and fraud prevention company he co-founded in 2017 with Naftali Harris after both worked as risk leaders at Affirm. Discovering that synthetic identities with real 750+ credit scores were slipping through the financial system, they built SentiLink into a platform now serving 300+ financial institutions - including three of the top 10 US banks - having verified several hundred million applications. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020, Blumenfeld holds a mathematics and economics degree from the University of Chicago and operates from Austin, Texas.
Naftali Harris
Naftali Harris is the Co-Founder and CEO of SentiLink, a San Francisco-based identity verification and fraud prevention company that helps over 400 financial institutions - including 10 of the 15 largest U.S. banks - detect synthetic identities and application fraud in real time. A Stanford-trained statistician who left his PhD program to become Affirm's first data scientist, Harris co-founded SentiLink in 2017 after seeing sophisticated fraud schemes up close. The company has raised $84 million in total funding, verifies over 3 million identities daily, and has been recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 and American Banker's 2024 Innovators of the Year.
Rick Song
Rick Song is the Co-Founder and CEO of Persona, the identity verification platform trusted by OpenAI, Instacart, LinkedIn, and 3,000+ others. A self-described reluctant founder, he left Square in 2018 after five years working on fraud and identity products, convinced there was a better way to build identity infrastructure. By 2025, Persona had completed 300+ million verifications, crossed $100M ARR, raised a $200M Series D at a $2B valuation, and was named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Identity Verification for the second consecutive year.
Ricardo Amper
Ricardo Amper is the Founder and CEO of Incode Technologies, a San Francisco-based AI-powered identity verification unicorn valued at $1.25 billion. A Mexican-born serial entrepreneur with two prior exits totaling ~$200 million, Amper built Incode from a near-failed social media startup into a global leader in biometric authentication and KYC/AML compliance — processing over 4 billion identity checks for clients including Citi, Nubank, Ford Credit, and government agencies. He is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer contributor, a champion of Gen Z hiring, and the driving force behind Incode's DeepSight deepfake-detection platform.
Soups Ranjan
Soups Ranjan is the co-founder and CEO of Sardine, an agentic AI platform for financial crime prevention and AML compliance headquartered in San Francisco. With a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University and career stints at Coinbase (as Head of Risk) and Revolut (Head of Financial Crime), he channeled over 15 years of fraud-fighting expertise into Sardine, which has raised $145.6M and grown to 300+ enterprise customers. Sardine's behavioral biometrics and device intelligence platform now profiles 2.2+ billion devices, making it one of the most comprehensive financial crime databases in existence.
Zahid Shaikh
Zahid Shaikh is the Co-Founder and Head of Risk Products at Sardine, an AI-powered fraud and compliance platform that has raised $145.6M in total funding. Previously a top inventor at PayPal where his device intelligence product saved the company $40M+ annually in fraud losses, Zahid then led risk and security product teams at Uber and Revolut before co-founding Sardine in April 2020 alongside Soups Ranjan and Aditya Goel. Sardine now profiles 2.2+ billion devices and achieved 130% YoY ARR growth in 2024.
Jesse Wedler
Jesse Wedler is a General Partner at CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth equity fund, where he has worked since its founding in 2013 - starting as an MBA intern and rising to lead investments in companies like Airbnb, Duolingo, Gusto, UiPath, and ID.me. Raised in Petaluma, California and educated at UC Berkeley and Stanford GSB, Wedler brings a deeply hands-on, thesis-driven approach to backing transformative B2B fintech, enterprise software, and identity companies at the growth stage. Known for rolling up his sleeves alongside founders and co-founding a chemistry camp for visually impaired youth with his brother, he blends long-term conviction with genuine operational partnership.
Ajay Amlani
Ajay Amlani is President and CEO of Aware, Inc., a Burlington, Massachusetts biometrics company. He co-founded the company that became CLEAR, founded YOU Technology (acquired by Kroger), helped launch the Defense Innovation Unit, served as a White House Fellow at the early Department of Homeland Security, and led the Americas for iProov before taking the top job at Aware in February 2025.
Vicky Bindra
Vicky Bindra is the CEO of Trulioo, a Vancouver-based global identity verification platform that has raised $478M in funding. A Chartered Accountant with an MBA from MIT Sloan, Bindra brings nearly 30 years of fintech and payments experience from leadership roles at Visa, Mastercard, Citi, GE Capital, Pine Labs, FIS, and Nuvei. Appointed CEO of Trulioo on April 1, 2025, he is now focused on accelerating product innovation, AI integration, and establishing Trulioo as the trusted infrastructure layer for digital identity in the era of agentic commerce.