ONFIDO

Husayn Kassai, Eamon Jubbawy, and Ruhul Amin met at the University of Oxford and noticed that verifying someone's identity online was still a mess of manual processes and guesswork. They founded Onfido in 2012 and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2013 batch, which gave them a US foothold and early customers.

The core product was straightforward: a user photographs their government ID and takes a selfie, and Onfido's AI confirms the document is real and the face matches. Simple premise.

Hard to execute at scale. They spent years building the data and model quality to make it accurate enough for regulated industries.

Onfido charges per identity check on a SaaS and volume basis. Clients — fintechs, banks, insurers, mobility companies, and gig economy platforms — pay to verify each new user during onboarding.

The Real Identity Platform bundles document verification, biometric analysis, and fraud signals into a single API. Enterprise clients can orchestrate multiple checks through Onfido Studio, paying for a more sophisticated compliance workflow.

Onfido Document Verification — AI analysis of government IDs from 195 countries for tampering, expiry, and authenticity. Onfido Biometric Analysis — facial matching and liveness detection to confirm the person holding the ID is real and present.

Onfido Studio — a no-code orchestration platform for building custom identity verification workflows. Real Identity Platform — the full-stack solution combining all verification checks with a risk signal layer.

Onfido focused on regulated industries in the UK and EU first, where GDPR and AML requirements made identity verification legally mandatory. It then expanded to North America and Asia, winning clients like Revolut, Bitstamp, and Zipcar.

The launch of Onfido Studio in 2022 signaled a move up-market toward enterprise orchestration. Partnerships with Salesforce, Stripe, and other platforms extended distribution without requiring direct sales.

Building an AI model accurate enough to pass muster with regulators in dozens of countries simultaneously is extremely hard. Every country has different ID documents, fraud patterns, and compliance standards.

Onfido had to build and maintain coverage for documents from 195 countries. The cost of errors in either direction — false rejections that frustrate real users or false approvals that let fraudsters through — was always high.

Y Combinator (2013 accelerator cohort). Idinvest Partners (Series A).

Salesforce Ventures (Series B). SoftBank Ventures Asia and M12 (Series C, 2019).

TPG, SoftBank Vision Fund II, and M12 (Series D, 2021). Acquired by Entrust in 2024.