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 Veriff is a global identity verification service company founded and headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia. The company offers services for online businesses to mitigate fraud attempts and assisting regulatory compliance.

Offering protection from identity fraud and identity theft, Veriff verifies a customer's identity automatically, using an AI that analyzes a multitude of technological and behavioural indicators, including facial recognition. The service is provided to companies as an API, which has been compared to Stripe.

As potential application areas, CEO Kaarel Kotkas has identified fintech, sharing economy, tourism, social media, dating sites, and recruitment. By 2019, Veriff had clients in financial sector, sharing economy and e-commerce from Berlin, London, New York, San Francisco, Vienna, and other global cities. According to Kotkas, their initially expected focus has shifted to fintech, mobility, marketplaces and cryptocurrencies.

In November 2019, Veriff claimed to be able to recognize over 5500 kinds of documents from over 190 countries, offering service in 34 languages, including Finnish, Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, Malaysian, and Vietnamese. In March 2020, according to CEO Kaarel Kotkas, the number of different government-​issued IDs processed by the company had grown over 7,000.

History
Veriff was created by Kaarel Kotkas who, although living on the second largest island of Estonia, had experienced difficulties while having to travel to the mainland for any identification-based transactions. After a short spell of working on the verification operations in Transferwise, 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. To assure the maximum level of security, Veriff has been conducting similar cooperation with the authorities in other countries. Among its 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 spring 2018, Veriff graduated from American seed accelerator Y-Combinator. By then, the company declared having 20 customers and aiming to gather $100,000 in revenue that month by charging $1 per verification.

In January 2019, Veriff acquired Estonian network intelligence company BrowserID, hiring its founder Argo Mändmaa as Veriff's fraud product manager. 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 (BGV). 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. At that time, Veriff said it could identify 3000 types of documents from 190 countries. Blockhain had started testing the verification service at the beginning of the year, expanding it to millions of clients. Formerly focusing on big companies, Veriff came out with subscription-based services for small and medium businesses in September 2019. By March 2020, Veriff was also working with Mintos, Turo, Grow Mobility and Transferwise.

In November 2019, Veriff recruited Guy Zerega, the former sales vice president of Stack Overflow, to become its senior VP of Revenue and open Veriff's first foreign office in New York City. By that time, Veriff employed over 300 people in it's Tallinn office and had raised 7.35 million euros in investments. Over 40% of its employees were foreigners from over 40 countries, and about one-tenth of them had relocated to Estonia. Besides Estonia, the most represented countries were Brazil, Georgia, Nigeria, Russia, and the U.S. The gender balance among employees was atypical for a tech company: 47% women vs. 53% men. Staff expansion was driven by the growth of business volumes. According to Kaarel Kotkas, the volume of verifications grew by an average of 90% per month during 2019.

In March 2020, the company stated that despite Brexit it was establishing customer-facing teams and account management in London. As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Veriff offered free digital identity verification for non-profits and foundations like universities and marketplaces for volunteers needing to reduce coronavirus transmission risk.

Verification process
The system cross-refers images of the customer taken by a local device with the identity information held in government databases, comparing thousands of ratios between 120 points on a person's face. Veriff next combines the results of face comparison and document validation with video analysis, device and network fingerprinting, and registry checks, providing real-time results. The combination of checks depends on the particular service's needs and risk appetite, as well as local laws and regulations - e.g., Estonia's regulations require a video interview with anyone wanting to open a bank account. In addition to analyzing the data acquired within a particular video session to ensure that the session is voluntary and not pre-recorded, Veriff crosslinks the data with other sessions to detect systematic fraud, complemented by PEP and sanctions checks.

If necessary, a manual verification by humans can be added to the automatic service. Different methods are used for different risk profiles while protecting personal and sensitive data. Verification flows are offered across platforms, having software development kits (SDKs) on the web as well as for Android and iOS. According to Veriff, 95% of its users can complete the identification process successfully on the first try.

In October 2019, Veriff released a near-field communication (NFC) verification tool to validate biometric documents. If a device has an integrated reader, the cross-platform tool reads data directly from the chip, detecting fraud attempts.

In March 2020, Veriff launched a new Assisted Image Capture (AIC) service as a separate solution. AIC gives customers real-time feedback to avoid the most common mistakes during the identification process, like blurriness, glare, facial occlusion or damaged ID documents.

Investors
Veriff's initial investor was Estonian bank Inbank (formerly Cofi) in 2016 via its subsidiaries Inbank Technologies and investment company Mobi Solutions, headed by IT visionary Linnar Viik.

Veriff raised a $7.7 million Series A round in 2018, led by Mosaic Ventures. The backers included TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus and Hollywood actor and tech investor Ashton Kutcher Mosaic's Simon Levene, and Transferwise's Taavet Hinrikus joined the Veriff board.

In 2018, Veriff Inc., registered in the U.S., became the sole proprietor of the Estonian company Veriff OÜ. In Estonian state registry, the transfer was formalized on October 22, 2019.

By the end of 2019, Veriff had raised investments in the range of 8,3 mln USD (7,35 mln euros). Among its investors were Mosaic Ventures, Y Combinator, SV Angel, ACE & Company, LIFT99, Estonian investors' association Superangel, Transferwise founder Taavet Hinrikus, Ashton Kutcher, Paul Buchheit, Elad Gil, Skype founders Sten Tamkivi and Jaan Tallinn, Ragnar Sass, Gustaf Alstromer, Anu Harihara, former CEO of LexisNexis Andrew Prozes et al.

Media attention
Media has named Veriff one of the potential next "unicorns" in Estonia, in addition to the four already started there.

Nordic Business Report named Veriff's founder Kaarel Kotkas as one of the 25 most influential young entrepreneurs in Europe in spring 2018.

At the end of 2018, Estonian venture capitalists named Veriff the startup of the year.

In January 2019, startup magazine EU Startups listed Veriff among "10 Estonian startups to look out for in 2019".

In March 2020, Kotkas was chosen the EY Estonian entrepreneur of the year.