The company betting that the most valuable record about you should belong to you - not a data broker, a fax machine, or a $100 invoice.
EXHIBIT A. The wordmark of a five-year-old startup that wants to retire the background-check industry's busywork - one verified credential at a time.
Somewhere right now a person is applying for an apartment, and the landlord wants proof they earn what they say they earn. In the old world, that triggers a small bureaucracy: a request form, a third party, a fee, a wait of days. In the TransCrypts world, the applicant taps a button, shares a cryptographically verified record, and the answer lands in under a minute. No documents change hands. No data broker sells the receipt. That swap - days for seconds, opacity for ownership - is the whole company in a sentence.
TransCrypts is a verification company, which sounds about as thrilling as a filing cabinet. Stay with it. Verification is the invisible tax on nearly everything that matters: getting hired, renting a home, taking out a loan, proving you are a licensed nurse and not a confident stranger. The industry built to handle this runs on legacy databases, per-check fees of $30 to $100, and the quiet assumption that your employment history is somebody else's asset. TransCrypts looked at that arrangement and asked the obvious, slightly impertinent question: why doesn't the person being verified own the proof?
As of late 2025, TransCrypts is a company with a fresh $15 million in the bank, more than four million users, and over 450 enterprise customers - a roster that reportedly includes Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 names. It processes employment and income verifications for a price the legacy world finds uncomfortable: under two dollars each, and in the case of its consumer product, nothing at all. The headquarters sits in the San Francisco Bay Area, in Fremont, California, with roots that stretch north to Canada.
The company's pitch has sharpened with the moment. We are living through the first years of cheap, convincing AI fraud - deepfaked faces, fabricated pay stubs, synthetic identities that pass a casual glance. TransCrypts positions itself squarely against that tide. If a credential is verified at the source and cryptographically sealed, a forgery has nowhere to hide. Trust, in their telling, stops being a vibe and becomes a property of the data itself.
TransCrypts was founded in 2020 by two cousins: Zain Zaidi, an American, and Ali Zaheer, a Canadian. The idea took shape at the University of Toronto Scarborough's incubator, The Hub - the kind of low-ceiling room where a lot of bad ideas and a few durable ones get their first audience. The durable one here was a refusal to accept that verification had to be slow, expensive, and owned by everyone except the individual.
Zaidi, who runs the company as CEO, was named one of The Globe and Mail's 2025 Changemakers of the Year - a tidy bit of validation for a founder whose central argument is that an entire industry has been pointed in the wrong direction. The company's growth backs the swagger: a reported 15-fold expansion over 24 months, and a Fortune 100 client base that doubled in 2025.
Strip away the blockchain vocabulary and TransCrypts is a set of tools that do three plain things: let you prove something true about yourself, let a business confirm it instantly, and keep a forger out of the middle.
Billed as the world's first completely free background check. Candidates permission-share verified employment, education, and identity data; employers get instant, fraud-proof confirmation without ever touching the original documents. Results in under 60 seconds.
Real-time, permission-based checks priced under $2, wired into 200+ HRIS and ATS systems including ADP, Workday, UKG, and Greenhouse. Lenders and landlords get an answer, not a stack of PDFs.
Instant, blockchain-backed screening that replaces the weeks-long, document-heavy ritual most hiring teams quietly dread.
Store and share your verified records - pay stubs, W-2s, transcripts, diplomas, licenses - on your terms, secured by encryption and blockchain. You decide who sees what, and for how long.
In October 2025, TransCrypts closed a $15 million seed round - around $20 million in Canadian dollars - led by Pantera Capital. The cap table reads like a verification of its own thesis, mixing crypto-native funds with mainstream venture and a celebrity backer who actually shows up to talk about the product.
*Approximate figures from aggregated public data.
Backers include:
Cousins Zain Zaidi and Ali Zaheer launch the company out of the University of Toronto Scarborough's incubator, The Hub.
Rapid growth across enterprises, including Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 clients, on the back of instant employment and income verification.
The free background check arrives, aiming to erase the $30-$100 per-check tax for both employers and applicants.
The platform extends self-sovereign data control into health records, and doubles its Fortune 100 client base.
Pantera Capital leads the round to combat AI fraud and expand the blockchain identity platform.
None of this is uncontested. The incumbents - Equifax's The Work Number, Checkr, Sterling, HireRight - have scale, relationships, and inertia on their side. The newer income-data players like Truework, Argyle, and Plaid are circling the same prize. And "free" always invites the question of where the revenue actually lives; for TransCrypts, the answer is the paid enterprise side and the per-verification economics, with the consumer product as the wedge.
There is also the perennial trust paradox of an identity company: to fix trust, you have to be trusted. TransCrypts leans on certifications - FCRA, CCPA, GDPR, HIPAA - and on the architecture itself, where the goal is that no one, including the company, has to be the unquestioned middleman. Whether the market rewards that purity or simply wants a cheaper version of the old thing is the open question of the next few years.
Back to that apartment application. In the old world, the landlord's request would still be sitting in a queue, the applicant refreshing an inbox, a fee quietly changing hands. In the world TransCrypts is building, the lease is already signed - because the proof arrived in seconds, the forger never got a turn, and the most personal record about the applicant did the one thing it was never allowed to do before: it belonged to them. That is the scene the company keeps trying to rewrite, one verification at a time. It is not glamorous work. It is, increasingly, infrastructure.