How Veriff found its voice

As Veriff celebrates its 10-year anniversary, we’ve explored the founders, the product, the customers, and the technology behind the company. But this episode of Veriff 10 shifts focus to something less tangible but just as defining: the story. 

Host Anisah Osman Britton sits down with Carly Brantz, Veriff’s Chief Marketing Officer, and Karita Sall, Vice President of Global Communications, to talk about how Veriff’s identity has evolved, from a small Estonian startup pitching its very first press conference, to a global trust brand shaping a new category.

Podcast produced by Any Other Business

How Veriff’s story began

Karita’s relationship with Veriff began before she ever stepped inside the company. In 2016, she was running a PR agency in Tallinn when Veriff hired her to organise its first press conference. Back then, the story was simple, youthful, and a little scrappy. The metaphor of “the Veriff Sheriff:” keeping order online just as a sheriff keeps order offline, was charming, but it didn’t reflect who Veriff wanted to be long-term. The company didn’t want to police the internet; it wanted to enable trust.

Around the same time, Karita found herself helping Kaarel Kotkas, Veriff’s founder, prepare for his Y Combinator interview. He tested his pitch in her office, unexpectedly facing a panel of seasoned investors she’d invited to challenge him. He struggled. But that moment unlocked the deeper stories he’d been carrying: growing up on Hiiumaa, hacking systems as a teenager, working alongside early Estonian tech pioneers, witnessing the fragility of digital identity. That raw honesty became the foundation of Veriff’s earliest narrative – one that felt grounded, human, and rooted in solving a genuine problem.

Joining at a moment of inflection

Almost a decade later, when Carly joined Veriff as CMO, the company had grown into something significantly larger: a global team with customers across continents and ambitions far beyond identity verification. She arrived just before Summer Week, Veriff’s annual all-company gathering in Tallinn, and immediately felt the energy of a team deeply aligned around a mission: making the internet safer.

She also noticed a recurring thread in earlier podcast episodes: the humility of the people who built Veriff. It’s a culturally Estonian trait, and one that has kept the company grounded. But from a brand perspective, Carly believes the next chapter requires a more assertive voice. Veriff has earned the right to speak boldly about what it does and the trust it enables. Her focus now is scaling the brand globally, without losing the authenticity Karita helped build.

Making a technical category feel human

Identity verification has never been the easiest thing to explain. It’s invisible by design, deeply technical, and often treated as admin rather than emotion. Yet Veriff’s communications have always centred on something distinctly human: trust.

In the early years, the work was almost educational; helping people understand what identity verification was, why it mattered, and why they could feel safe doing it. Karita remembers watching how first-time users behaved: treating their selfie like a passport photo, re-taking it endlessly, sprinting to another room to find their ID while the verification timer quietly ran. Those insights didn’t just influence messaging; they influenced the product itself, prompting Veriff to redesign the flow to match real human behaviour.

Then the pandemic hit, and identity verification shifted from niche to essential. Suddenly, almost every part of life required proving who you were online. Throughout that shift, Veriff avoided leaning into fear or doom. Fraud is real, but the company’s tone has always been about empowerment: opening up markets, not closing them; enabling safe participation, not scaring people into compliance.

Carly describes it as a trust life cycle. Trust isn’t a single moment or a one-time check. It’s something that is built, maintained, and renewed over time as behaviour and context change. That idea, she says, is what makes Veriff’s story stretch across industries, cultures, and use cases, from fintechs in London to marketplaces in São Paulo to dating apps in New York.

One voice with many accents

One of Carly’s guiding principles is that Veriff should sound like one company with many accents. The core of its voice remains consistent: modern, clear, human, and technically credible without being weighed down by jargon. But as Veriff expands, that voice adapts. A press story in London won’t sound exactly like a digital ad in Brazil, and a panel discussion in the US won’t match the tone of an internal all-hands in Tallinn.

What ties them together is the same foundation: a company born in Estonia, shaped by digital identity culture, now speaking to a global audience without losing sight of where it came from. Sometimes the Estonian story is the perfect entry point; sometimes the problem or product takes centre stage. The skill lies in knowing which “accent” belongs where.

The founder’s role and the expanding cast

Kaarel is still one of Veriff’s strongest storytellers: charismatic, curious, and a living example of the company’s values. But no brand can grow on one voice alone. Today, Veriff’s story is intentionally shared among many: product leaders, fraud and AI specialists, regional experts, long-time employees. Founder storytelling now complements the broader company narrative, rather than anchoring it entirely.

Karita and Carly also talk about how they treat Kaarel’s work outside the company with projects like helping bring OpenAI into Estonian schools or supporting programmes for kids. None of it is used transactionally as a marketing tool. Instead, it’s understood as an expression of the values that shaped Veriff in the first place: curiosity, integrity, and a desire to give people better tools. When those stories are told, they reinforce what Veriff stands for.

Internal storytelling: where the brand really lives

Both leaders emphasise that a strong external brand starts internally. As Carly puts it, you can’t market what your people don’t believe in.

With more than 50 nationalities across the company, internal alignment matters. Veriff is currently refreshing its values, not because they’ve changed, but because a company that spans continents needs to ensure those values still carry the same meaning. Internal rituals like Summer Week, global hackathons and regular all-hands play just as important a role as media coverage or ad campaigns. They reinforce culture, build trust, and create shared understanding.

Karita’s advice to younger companies is simple: treat internal brand-building like any other part of the business. Test, iterate, adjust. If something stops resonating, change it. The worst thing you can do is cling to a version of your story that no longer fits the company you’ve become.

Trust infrastructure and the decade ahead

Looking forward, Veriff’s story is widening. Carly is leading a brand refresh (not a rebrand) designed to ensure that how Veriff looks and sounds matches what it already is: a global, innovative company operating far beyond point-in-time ID checks. The company is positioning itself firmly in the space of trust infrastructure, where trust isn’t a checkpoint but a continuous experience.

Karita puts the long-term vision plainly. The mission, to make the internet safer, will never be fully “finished,” because new threats emerge constantly. And that’s exactly why the work stays meaningful. She also shares a dream the team has held for years: turning “to veriff yourself” into a verb. A future where people verify once with Veriff, and that trust can be used across services and borders without restarting the process every time. A kind of passport for the digital world.

Ten years in, Veriff’s technology has evolved dramatically, its markets have expanded, and its ambitions have grown. But the story remains rooted in the same thing that brought the company to life in the first place: trust; how you build it, how you protect it, and how you carry it forward into a world that needs it more than ever.