// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did IDfy data say? "I'd identify myself

IDfy

Type	Private
Industry	Identity Verification, Anti-money Laundering, Risk and Fraud Management, Privacy and Data Governance
Founded	2011
Founders	Ashok Hariharan Vineet Jawa
Headquarters	Mumbai, India
Area served	India, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt
Key people	Ashok Hariharan (CEO), Paritosh Desai (Chief Product & Marketing Officer), Wriju Ray (Chief Business Officer), Ashish Sahni (Chief Technology Officer), Malcolm Gomes (Chief Operating Officer), Kaushik Shah (Chief Solutions Architect), Tridib Mukherjee (Chief Data Scientist and AI Officer), Rahul Lakhani (Country Head India)
Owner	Baldor Technologies
Website	www.idfy.com

IDfy is Asia’s trust stack company, headquartered in Mumbai, India. Ashok Hariharan and Vineet Jawa founded the company in 2011. IDfy provides identity verification, risk intelligence, and data privacy and governance solutions to banks, financial services, retail, logistics, and mobility enterprises.

The company started as an employment background verification provider before expanding into a complete trust infrastructure. As of 2026, it operates across eight countries - India, the Philippines, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Egypt, and Singapore. It serves more than 500 clients and processes over 70 million verifications per month.

In 2026, IDfy raised ₹476 crore (approximately $53 million) in a funding round led by Neo Asset Management for acquisitions, international expansion, and product development. The company previously secured $27 million in 2024 from Elev8 Venture Partners, KB Investment, and Tenacity Ventures. Blume Ventures, IDfy's first institutional investor, has continuously backed it since 2012.

History

Origin and early years

In 2009, while hiring for his education technology startup in Mumbai, Ashok Hariharan found that three of 1,600 applicants for a position had submitted word-for-word identical resumes, including the same grammatical errors. Interviews with the candidates confirmed they had misrepresented their credentials.

The incident prompted Hariharan to found IDfy in 2011 with Vineet Jawa from his living room in Bandra, Mumbai. Hariharan, a Penn State engineering and ISB graduate, previously developed high-speed network processors and led corporate strategy. Jawa, also an ISB graduate, later co-founded the credit risk platform CredRight.

Kaushik Shah joined the company at its inception in November 2011 as Chief Technology Officer. He built IDfy's first product, a background verification platform for employee screening and onboarding. Shah led the technology function until 2019, when he became Chief Solutions Architect.

IDfy's expansion beyond traditional employment background checks began in late 2014 following regulatory mandates for driver verification introduced after a high-profile sexual assault incident involving an Uber driver in New Delhi. Demand for driver verification surged across ride-hailing and gig economy platforms. The company leveraged its pre-existing mobile optical character recognition (OCR) technology to scale operations from 150 verifications per month to 4,000 per day.

Growth and product expansion

Following the launch of the Government of India's Digital India initiative in 2015, IDfy aligned its product expansion with the country's growing digitization. To lead this strategy, the company appointed Wriju Ray as Chief Business Officer in September 2015. Ray had spent over a decade commercializing products for Fortune 500 companies across Europe, the Americas, and Asia at British Telecom and Oracle.

In the mid-2010s, India's digital infrastructure expanded rapidly: Aadhaar enrolment crossed one billion residents in 2016, the Unified Payments Interface launched the same year, and the November 2016 demonetization of high-value currency notes accelerated the adoption of digital payments and online account opening. These shifts created demand among banks, non-banking financial companies, and fintech firms for digital identity verification and know-your-customer processes, and IDfy expanded from employment background checks into identity verification for financial services.

In 2018, Hariharan contributed to the Justice Srikrishna Committee formed by the government to draft the foundational framework for India's data protection laws. Following this privacy framework's evolution, the company began developing data governance tools for enterprises.

In 2019, Ashish Sahni was appointed Chief Technology Officer. Sahni brought over 25 years of experience building IT systems for banks and financial institutions, most recently as CTO India at Barclays. He overhauled the company's technology infrastructure, introducing instrumentation-led development to support high-performance, high-scale systems.

As IDfy transitioned toward a platform portfolio, Paritosh Desai joined as Chief Product Officer in 2020. He also serves as Chief Marketing Officer. Desai began his career in consulting with clients including Goldman Sachs, Allstate, and AXA, and previously headed product at Ridlr, which was acquired by Ola. He established IDfy's formalized product organization and introduced an integrated operating model that unified the company's platform architecture.

That same year, during the COVID-19 pandemic, IDfy launched its Video KYC platform within three months of Indian regulatory changes permitting video-based customer identification. HDFC Bank subsequently adopted the platform for its live video KYC operations.

Acquisitions and international expansion

In 2022, IDfy acquired CrimeCheck, a digital database of criminal and legal history records in India comprising over 330 million court records. The acquisition became the basis of OneRisk, the company's risk intelligence product, which also includes a registry of approximately 150,000 companies that issue fake employment certificates with real salary credits and provident fund contributions.

In 2022, IDfy expanded to the Philippines, followed by Indonesia and the Middle East and North Africa region in 2023.

As Wriju Ray transitioned to oversee international operations, IDfy appointed Rahul Lakhani as Country Head for India in August 2022. Lakhani brought over two decades of experience, having worked at Google previously and most recently led enterprise business at CleverTap.

Between 2023 and 2024, the company also launched IDfy360, a real-time onboarding platform that reduced onboarding time by 80%.

Recent developments

Drawing directly on Hariharan’s earlier work with the Srikrishna Committee, the company subsequently launched Privy in 2024. It is a privacy and data governance platform that integrates consent management, data lineage, and risk mitigation across corporate data lifecycles.

In March 2025, IDfy appointed Malcolm Gomes as Chief Operating Officer. Gomes had spent 17 years at McKinsey & Company, where he was a Partner advising banks, NBFCs, insurers, and fintechs across India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. At IDfy, he leads a larger operational framework to support the scale of Privy.

IDfy appointed Tridib Mukherjee as Chief Data Scientist and AI Officer in December 2025. Mukherjee holds a PhD in computer science from Arizona State University, has over 70 publications, and more than 40 patents. Previously, he led a 45-member AI and data science team at Games24x7. He oversees the development of advanced frontier models and machine learning frameworks at IDfy, focusing on AI-based fraud detection and decision intelligence.

Platforms & Products

IDfy operates three core platforms serving distinct functions in identity verification, risk management, and data privacy compliance.

OnboardIQ

OnboardIQ provides user onboarding services, including pre-screening, compliance verification, and fraud detection across self-service, video, and in-person assisted channels. It processes millions of onboarding transactions monthly across multiple customer segments. The platform is built on IDfy360, a low-code workflow orchestration layer, and includes video services that support multi-party video interaction, deepfake detection, and in-call data collection and verification. The platform is compliant with the Reserve Bank of India's KYC Master Direction.

OneRisk

OneRisk assesses risk for individuals, businesses, and assets such as homes and vehicles, aggregating over 500 data signals into a single risk score. The platform uses machine learning models to identify fraud indicators and evaluate financial, legal, and reputational risks. Financial institutions use it for underwriting and IPO due diligence; approximately 90 percent of mainboard IPO due diligence processes in India use the platform.

Privy

Privy manages compliance obligations under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, covering consent lifecycle management, data principal rights, discovery of personally identifiable information, cookie governance, privacy risk assessment, incident management, and third-party risk evaluation. The platform uses natural language processing and computer vision for automated compliance monitoring and serves privacy, legal, compliance, security, product, and business teams. Privy has more than 50 live implementations across enterprise environments. In 2024, the company also developed a companion tool, PriView, a privacy notice generator, in partnership with the Data Security Council of India, which micro and small enterprises have adopted.

Operations

IDfy is headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, with additional offices in Pune, Bangalore, and the Philippines. Through these offices, the company operates across eight countries: India, the Philippines, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Egypt, and Singapore.

The company serves enterprises across financial services, consumer and retail, FMCG, logistics, and mobility sectors.

Within financial services, its banking clients include HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, IDFC FIRST Bank, IndusInd Bank, Federal Bank, IDBI Bank, and American Express. Among non-banking financial companies and fintechs, the company works with Bajaj Finserv, Mahindra Finance, TVS Credit, Cholamandalam, LIC HFL, PhonePe, Paytm, Razorpay, and PayPal. Its clients in insurance include LIC, HDFC Life, Bajaj Allianz, Tata AIA, Tata AIG, Reliance General Insurance, and Kotak Life.

Beyond financial services, IDfy serves consumer and commerce companies, including Flipkart, Uber, Zomato, Blinkit, Urban Company, and Cars24, along with enterprises such as Hindustan Unilever and Asian Paints in FMCG, Porter and Blackbuck in logistics, and Tata Electronics and Vodafone Idea, among others.

Internationally, the company works with financial institutions across Southeast Asia, including BPI, BDO Unibank, RCBC, GoTyme Bank, UNO Digital Bank, and Bank Sampoerna, along with payments platforms including Global Payments, Paynamics, and PayMongo.

As of 2026, IDfy operates with over 800 employees. The company processes over 70 million identity verifications monthly and reported preventing over 20 million potential frauds in fiscal year 2026. Its international operations have grown 100 percent year on year.

IDfy has also filed five patent applications covering technologies across vehicle history verification, data privacy compliance, and financial transaction analysis.

Awards and Recognition

IDfy has received industry awards and rankings for its verification, financial technology, and regulatory compliance platforms:

• 2016: Recognized as the Best Background Screening Service Provider at the World HRD Congress.
• 2021: Named Fintech Scaleup of the Year at the India FinTech Awards (IFTA).
• 2022: Included in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India list.
• 2022-2023: Ranked among Asia's top five regulatory technology providers for two consecutive years, and featured on the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list in 2023.
• 2026: The company's data privacy platform, Privy, won "Code for Consent: The DPDP Innovation Challenge," an initiative organized by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's MeitY Startup Hub and the National e-Governance Division (NeGD). In its evaluation, the organisers noted that IDfy’s submission showed strong alignment with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, alongside notable innovation, technical robustness, and the practical applicability of its privacy and data governance platform, with consent management as the entry point to end-to-end DPDP implementation.

Industry Memberships and Affiliations

IDfy is a member of several industry organizations, including the Fintech Convergence Council (FCC), the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), and the Fintech Alliance Philippines. The company holds Gold-tier membership in the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM).

External links

• Official website