The Origin
The Transcript Nobody Could Find
It was 2020. Zain Zaidi was a senior at San Jose State University, Electrical Engineering, applying to graduate programs. He needed a copy of his own academic transcript. What followed was a bureaucratic maze so banal and so universal that billions of people had quietly accepted it as normal: institutional data locked inside systems that weren't built for the person the data was about.
Zaidi did not accept it as normal. He wrote a business plan instead.
He brought that plan to the Silicon Valley Business Plan Competition at SJSU. He won $10,000. He called his Canadian cousin Ali Zaheer - who became co-founder and CTO - and they started TransCrypts from that prize money and that problem. One blocked transcript. One company with four million users and counting.
Give people 100% control of their identity.
- Zain Zaidi, Founder & CEO, TransCrypts
The company they built is not just another HR software tool. TransCrypts is a self-sovereign identity platform - meaning the credentials (employment history, education, medical records) live with the individual, verified and portable, not locked inside a company's database or a university's legacy system. Employers can verify instantly. Applicants own their records. No middleman charges $30-$100 per check. That last point turned into a product: JustScreen, launched July 2025, the world's first completely free background check service.
The Company
TransCrypts at Scale
In twenty-four months, TransCrypts grew fifteen-fold. That sentence requires a second read: not 15%, not doubling, but a fifteen-times expansion in the number of people using the platform. As of 2025, those numbers include 450+ enterprise clients - multiple Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies among them - and deployment across nine countries. HIPAA certification landed in 2025, opening the door to healthcare verification at institutional scale.
450+
Enterprise Clients
4M+
Platform Users
9
Countries
15x
Growth in 24 Months
$0
Cost for JustScreen
120K+
Lives Impacted
The technology integrates with ADP, BambooHR, and Namely - the platforms HR teams already live in. The product isn't asking enterprise buyers to change their workflow. It's asking them to upgrade what happens inside it: faster verification, fraud-resistant credentials, and an employee experience that doesn't involve chasing down paper records.
JustScreen compressed the background check - traditionally a $30 to $100 per-person cost - to zero. For gig economy companies, staffing agencies, and startups trying to scale without burning payroll on compliance overhead, that is not a feature. It's a structural shift in unit economics.
The Money
Mark Cuban Called. Pantera Capital Followed.
Getting Mark Cuban to write a check is one thing. Getting Pantera Capital - a fund built on backing blockchain-native protocols - to bet on an HR verification company is a different kind of validation. When Pantera led the $15M seed round in October 2025, it was a signal that TransCrypts had proven something: blockchain's most durable use case might not be trading tokens. It might be giving a nurse in Kyiv access to her own medical history.
2021
$10,000 - Won Silicon Valley Business Plan Competition at SJSU. Seed capital for the first hires and the first code.
2022
$1.4M Pre-Seed - Closed within days of completing the inaugural Filecoin Techstars Accelerator in Seattle. Techstars, Alumni Ventures, One Piece Ventures among backers.
Jan 2023
$3.2M Pre-Seed Extension - Led by Mark Cuban and Protocol Labs. Global Millennial Capital, Underdog Labs, Atland Ventures participating.
Oct 2025
$15M Seed - Led by Pantera Capital. Joined by Lightspeed Faction, Alpha Edison, Motley Fool Ventures, California Innovation Fund, Tomer London (angel), and returning investors Mark Cuban and Techstars.
"TransCrypts puts control back in people's hands, making verification faster, smarter and more secure. I'm excited to be an investor."
- Mark Cuban, investor, TransCrypts
Impact
The Records That Crossed a Border
Background verification has an obvious commercial application. The humanitarian application was not obvious - until Ukraine.
When the 2022 Russian invasion displaced millions of Ukrainians, TransCrypts found a use for their platform that no business plan had contemplated: refugees who needed to prove their medical history to new hospitals in new countries, with no paper records and no institutional access. Zaidi's team deployed the platform for Ukrainian healthcare organizations. Over 4,000 displaced people got access to their verified medical records. The platform's QR-code system let them view, share, and translate those records into the language of whatever country they'd landed in. The team found a 40% improvement in quality of care for refugee users.
4,000+
Ukrainian Refugees
+40%
Healthcare Quality
120K+
Lives Impacted
After Ukraine, they expanded into Turkey following the 2023 earthquake. In Adana, patients who had lost everything - including proof of who they were and what treatments they'd had - could share their verified medical history with new hospitals using the TransCrypts platform. The commercial case for self-sovereign identity had already been made. The humanitarian case was now documented.
This is the part of the story that put Zaidi on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2026. Not the revenue, not the seed round. The 4,000 refugees. Forbes placed him in the Social Impact category.
The Founder
Building With Your Cousin
TransCrypts has an unusual founding structure. Zain (CEO, Bay Area) and Ali Zaheer (CTO, Canada) are cousins - which explains both the company's early dual nationality and its eventual decision to open a Toronto headquarters after the $15M seed close. The cross-border co-founder dynamic was not a quirk; it became a feature. TransCrypts serves international verification cases - candidates in 9 countries, refugees crossing borders - partly because its founders started from two different jurisdictions and built for that reality.
Zaidi graduated from San Jose State in 2021 with an Electrical Engineering degree. He does not have a computer science background in the traditional sense. He has a problem-solving background that found a problem large enough to absorb a career. The Techstars program in Seattle (2022) accelerated the company's early trajectory; the team completed the 13-week cohort and closed a funding round days after graduating.
He has since appeared on the SHRM AI + HI podcast (discussing deepfakes and self-sovereign verification), sat for a Bloomberg interview on digital data sovereignty, and been profiled by SJSU, BetaKit, and the University of Toronto. The media coverage is not the usual startup-founder circuit of product launches. It tracks with where the hard verification problems are: AI fraud, refugee records, employment screening for gig workers, healthcare compliance.
The Moment
Why 2025 Was the Right Year
The $15M seed round did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in the middle of an AI fraud panic. Deepfakes of job applicants. Synthetic credentials generated in seconds. Background check providers discovering their records could be spoofed. TransCrypts' blockchain-anchored verification - where credentials are cryptographically signed by the issuing institution and held by the individual - is structurally resistant to the attack that is currently dismantling HR departments' trust in traditional screening. Zaidi has been articulating this argument on the SHRM conference circuit and in podcasts since early 2025. By October 2025, Pantera Capital agreed it was worth $15M.
Track Record
What He Has Built
- Forbes 30 Under 30, 2026 - Social Impact category
- $18M+ raised across pre-seed, pre-seed extension, and seed rounds
- 15x company growth over 24 months
- 450+ enterprise clients including Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies
- 4M+ platform users across 9 countries
- Launched JustScreen - the world's first free background check service (July 2025)
- Helped 4,000+ Ukrainian refugees access medical records
- Deployed to Turkey earthquake relief in Adana, 2023
- HIPAA certification achieved (2025)
- Completed inaugural Filecoin Techstars Accelerator cohort, Seattle (2022)
- Won $10,000 Silicon Valley Business Plan Competition at SJSU (2021)
Off The Record
Details Worth Knowing
The company started because Zaidi couldn't get his own college transcript. The most important startups are usually the ones solving the most embarrassingly obvious problems nobody fixed.
His co-founder and CTO is his Canadian cousin. This is why TransCrypts now has dual headquarters in Fremont, CA and downtown Toronto.
Pantera Capital - a crypto fund - backed an HR background check company. That is either a strange investment thesis or a confirmation that blockchain finally has its killer app.
TransCrypts closed a $1.4M funding round within days of finishing the Techstars accelerator. The pitch deck was still warm.
JustScreen replaced a $30-$100 per-check fee with zero. Competitors charging three digits per background screen are now in the free-competitor problem.
The Ukrainian refugee use case was never in the original business plan. It emerged from the platform's structure and the team's willingness to deploy it for a crisis that was not their core market.
Find Him Online
Links & Profiles
