Kaarel Kotkas

Founder & CEO Veriff

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Kaarel Kotkas is the founder and chief executive of Veriff, the Estonian identity-verification company he started in 2015 at the age of twenty and has run ever since. The origin story is unusually direct: as a teenager on the island of Hiiumaa he doctored his own government ID to get around an age restriction online, it worked, and he concluded that the systems meant to establish who someone is were not fit for purpose. After a short period working on verification operations at Wise, he built a company to fix that. Veriff now checks identity documents and biometrics for fintech, crypto, healthcare and marketplace customers including Bolt, Blockchain.com and Wise, employs over 500 people, and was valued at around $1.5bn at its 2022 Series C, making it Estonia’s ninth unicorn. Kotkas has since pushed the company past its original remit — the February 2026 acquisition of the Know Your Business provider Vespia is an explicit move from verifying people to verifying companies as well, under the banner of a single trust platform. He was EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year for Estonia in 2020 and made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe technology list in 2023.

Career Highlights

• Founded Veriff in 2015 and has led it as CEO for over a decade.
• Named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2020 for Estonia.
• Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list for 2023, in the Technology category.
• Raised close to $200m in total, including a $7.7m Series A in 2018 led by Mosaic Ventures, a $69m Series B in 2021 led by IVP and Accel, and a $100m Series C in January 2022 co-led by Tiger Global and Alkeon Capital.
• Reached a valuation of roughly $1.5bn at the 2022 round, making Veriff the ninth Estonian unicorn after Skype, Playtech, Wise, Bolt, Pipedrive, Zego, ID.me and Gelato.
• Acquired BrowserID in 2019, adding device-based fraud detection, and Vespia in February 2026, adding business verification.
• Opened Veriff’s New York office in November 2019 and its London operation in 2020, and grew headcount past 500.
• Previously worked on verification operations at Wise before founding Veriff.

Professional Journey

Kotkas grew up on Hiiumaa, an island off the Estonian coast, and came to identity verification by breaking it. As a minor he wanted access to an online service with an age requirement, altered his government ID, and found the check passed. He has told the story consistently in interviews since, and it is the reason the company exists rather than a retrofitted narrative. He had intended to study medicine at the University of Tartu; instead he went to Estonian Business School and, in 2015, founded Veriff. Before that he had spent a short spell working on the verification side of operations at Wise, then TransferWise — a fintech dealing every day with exactly the problem of establishing at a distance that a person is who they claim to be.

Veriff’s first market was narrower than its founder expected. The initial bet was on Estonian e-Residency, on the assumption that a large population of remote e-residents would need banking services and therefore verification. That market turned out to be small, and Estonian banks made life difficult for e-residents in any case. Kotkas has framed the disappointment as useful: it forced the company to build something that had to be trusted by any customer rather than a single programme. Janer Gorohhov, who joined early and became chief operating officer, came aboard while finishing a degree in Tartu and on minimal pay, taking on legal, contracts, sales and product work as the company found its shape.

The funding history tracks a company that was proved right slowly and then quickly. An initial investment came from the Estonian bank Inbank in 2016, followed by a $7.7m Series A in 2018 led by Mosaic Ventures and a €13.8m bridge in 2020. By 2021 the identity-verification market had become strategically important to fintech and crypto, and a $69m Series B led by IVP and Accel was followed within months by a $100m Series C in January 2022, co-led by Tiger Global and Alkeon Capital, at a valuation reported between $1.3bn and $1.5bn. Along the way Veriff acquired BrowserID in 2019 to add device-level fraud signals to document checks, and developed NFC-based reading of biometric passports.

The most recent phase has been about widening the definition of the product. Verifying an individual is only half of what a regulated business needs; the other half is establishing that a counterparty company is real, is who it says it is, and is not a shell. That process, Know Your Business, has historically been slow and manual. In February 2026 Veriff acquired Vespia, an Estonian KYB provider founded in 2021 by Julia Ront — who had been Veriff’s second employee — and Anton Vedešin, with terms undisclosed and integration targeted for mid-2026. Kotkas framed the deal not as an incremental fix but as an attempt to rebuild KYB as a real-time, end-to-end process on the same platform, consistent with his longer argument that trust online should be a single piece of infrastructure rather than a stack of separate checks.

Education

Estonian Business School

Bachelor’s degree, business, studied from 2015

Forbes records the degree without a specific designation. Kotkas has said publicly that he had planned to study medicine at the University of Tartu before founding Veriff instead.