The story
Veriff was created by Kaarel Kotkas who, while living on Hiiumaa, the second-largest island of Estonia, had experienced difficulties with identification-based transactions. As he helped run his family farm, he tried to buy supplies online and encountered difficulties setting up a PayPal account – he was rejected as he was a minor. Without thinking twice at the time, he tampered with the photo of his government issued ID card and changed the year of his birth from 1994 to 1984. His PayPal account was activated, but the thought of how easy it was to trick the system was unsettling for Kotkas. And so, he was set on the path of developing a better and more secure ID verification process. After a short spell of working on the verification operations at Wise, Kotkas founded Veriff in 2015 as a startup that would combine different methods of distanced verification to provide a more reliable online service.
In Estonia, the service launched in June 2016 and by September 2016, the company employed 12 people. For a year, Veriff worked with the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of the Interior, the Estonian Data Protection Inspectorate, and Estonian e-residency program, to create procedures for using the national registries that would preserve the integrity of personal data. Among its first clients was Estonia's largest online retailer Hansapost.
The company started by offering verification services to the banking sector. After the initial investor, Estonian bank Inbank (formerly Cofi) from 2016, another Estonian bank LHV started offering bank account opening via video link only, without any physical visits, in 2017. Financial regulations in Estonia didn't allow opening accounts for enterprises or making transfers over 10,000 euros without physical identification. The possibility of distanced identification for banks became legally available in Estonia in June 2016.
In June 2018, Veriff graduated from American seed accelerator Y-Combinator. At the end of 2018, Estonian venture capitalists named Veriff the startup of the year.
In January 2019, Veriff acquired Estonian network intelligence company BrowserID. BrowserID was working on the collection and analysis of device-based data for fraud monitoring purposes. Primarily interested in Browser ID’s device-based data capabilities, the acquisition expanded Veriff’s fraud prevention benchmark beyond facial recognition and document verification.
In June 2019, Veriff signed an agreement with Berlin's public transportation company Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG). BVG uses Veriff's service to identify the users of its mobility app Jelbi, covering Berlin's entire public transportation system from scooters and bikes to car-sharing and traditional taxis.
Veriff's agreement with Blockchain.com was announced in August 2019. Blockchain had started testing the verification service at the beginning of the year. Formerly focusing on big companies, Veriff came out with subscription-based services for small and medium businesses in September 2019. By June 2021, Veriff was also working with companies like Bolt, Opera, Mintos, Turo, Grow Mobility, Verify 365 and Wise.
In November 2019, Veriff opened its first foreign office in New York City. By that time, Veriff employed over 300 people in its Tallinn office and had raised 7.35 million euros in investments.
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In March 2020, Kotkas was chosen the EY Estonian entrepreneur of the year. In the same month, the company stated that despite Brexit it was establishing customer-facing teams and account management in London. In the beginning of May, though, Veriff announced it would lay off 63 employees because the COVID-19 pandemic had increased the business volume in Europe and the U.S. where the company offered fully automatic services, while diminishing the need for online verification in countries where more human oversight had been necessary.
In June, Veriff raised additional 13.8 million euros from investors. By that time, their number of employees had fallen to 230.
In 2022, Veriff raised $100 million in funding from investors, raising the company's value to $1.3 billion. With this, Veriff was classified as a unicorn.
From Wikipedia’s article on Veriff, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5