Meet Veriff

We verify people’s identities for online businesses everywhere on Earth.

Your instant global anti-fraud spray

Every day, we help banks, marketplaces, and other online businesses start trusting relationships with customers. Veriff is global, works on every device, and fits your onboarding flow without hurting conversion rates. It’s built by 50 friendly people with mean R&D muscle. That’s how we stay ahead of the bad guys.

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How we got here

Innovation often starts with real-life problems. The Veriff story is no different. If you’ve ever done due diligence on new customers, you know it’s a journey fraught with fraud and potential losses.

Kaarel and Janer in Y Combinator

The short and boring version

In 2015, aged just 20, Kaarel Kotkas founded Veriff. The product was launched in summer 2016. That’s when Inbank and Hansapost integrated Veriff to verify their customers.

The fascinating version

While still a teenager, Kaarel realized that global companies had terribly inadequate ID checks online.

About to graduate from high school, he did a case study for TransferWise, the money-sending service. Kaarel’s task was to outsmart ID verification providers with a false ID. He became obsessed with the task and got sidetracked… during his final math exam.

When the exam ended, Kaarel, the top math guy in Estonia, had barely finished half of it. A planned career in medicine was doomed. Also, TransferWise decided not to hire him.

Still, Kaarel kept developing the case study and wrote code for what would later become Veriff. The company was registered in October 2015.

Fast-forward to 2018. Having joined the spring batch at Y Combinator’s, Veriff blew everyone’s socks off. On Demo Day, the company got more than 200 offers from VCs.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Key people

Kaarel Kotkas

Founder & CEO

Kaarel is the strategic thinker behind Veriff’s vision and product. Friendly hacker, who leads the team to be always one step ahead of fraudsters and competition.

Focusing always on the solutions and being full of energy, he empowers Veriff team to stand for the honesty in the digital world. In 2018, Nordic Business Report named him one of 25 most-influential young entrepreneurs in Northern Europe.

Janer Gorohhov

Co-founder & COO

Janer is building a product-oriented team and scaling operations to match Veriff’s growth rate.

He is a tech-savvy innovation enthusiast who started as a full-stack developer. But, as talented people do, he also has a knack for legal and regulatory compliance.

Enn Metsar

Business Development Manager

Enn is inspired by the challenge of converting Veriff’s engineering and creative excellence into commercial success.

Before joining Veriff, Enn worked as GM at Uber Baltics, launching Uber in Estonia and Lithuania. Enn has extensive experience from financial markets and business development.