IDfy Story
How the seed of IDfy was planted
As with many stories from the city of dreams called Mumbai, this story too begins with a hunt for a home.
Ashok had just returned to India from London and was looking for an apartment to rent. One apartment, in particular, caught his eye. However, the elderly owner of the house was the non-trusting kind. A trait that had left her house unoccupied for almost a year.
Ashok tried persuading her. But nothing seemed to work. Until she realised that Ashok is of South Indian origin. Suddenly she was happy to have him as a tenant. All because she thought that “South Indians do not fight”.
To give him credit, Ashok did not shatter her misconception at the time. But it did get the noodle spinning in his head about the trust gap in the world. People need to make better informed decisions rather than go by flawed preconceived notions, Ashok thought.
How IDfy was visualised
A wedding party is a perfect breeding ground for a lot of things, but a multi-million dollar business idea is usually not one. IDfy is an exception.
In Dec 2010, Ashok and Vineet were attending Vineet’s brother’s wedding. There was a makeshift bar in the boot of a car, known in Delhi as the ‘Car-o-Bar’ when the discussion shifted to problems that can and should be solved with technology. The problem of lack of trust and the need to bridge the trust gap resonated with everybody.
Ashok and Vineet decided to bring this idea into reality.
The wonder years
Those who were there then consider the early days of IDfy – a renegade bootstrapped startup – as the best years of their working life. This is when the IDfy culture started to take root. Working intense hours but partying even harder. Knowing that everyone succeeds or fails together and helping each other achieve the common goal.
During those days we learnt to celebrate our victories. Like the first client. Or the first major client (Vodafone). Or when we hit big time when the taxi aggregation sector took off.
We also learnt to celebrate our failures.
This period is affectionately remembered at IDfy as the Sakinaka days, named after our office location.
Big failure that was a great learning experience
We decided to make it easier for people to get jobs by giving them a unique ID that will have all verifications and checks done and updated at all times. Think of it as LinkedIn for Blue Collar workers. We called it OneID.
We enrolled 300,000 users in 2 weeks. While people really saw the value, unfortunately, at the time, corporations didn’t. Jobs for them were not forthcoming. We were a bit too early for the market.
That’s when we recognised who we really are. B2C wasn’t quite in our DNA. We figured that we are made to be in the enterprise space, solving problems for companies and helping them serve the community better.
Discovering ourselves in the year of the pandemic
The year 2020 will go down in IDfy history as a seminal year, one in which we discovered who we are and things that we are capable of.
When the pandemic hit and the world went into lockdown we, like many others, were staring at rock bottom. Our revenues dropped suddenly at a time we were aiming for rapid growth.
This is when the IDfy spirit came to the fore. Everyone pulled together for the company in the face of severe personal challenges.
We launched new products – Video KYC and Zero Touch Onboarding. We took HDFC Bank’s Video KYC Live. We were onboarding 2 delivery executives every minute for Amazon helping them meet surging demand.
2020 is the year when IDfy suddenly grew up from an adolescent to an adult, ready to take our place in the sun.
Our
Journey
-
IDfy is born
Domain bought for $1000 -
5 People
5 Clients
10K Lives Touched
Kaushik Shah joins to build the tech backbone -
10 People
20 Clients
90K Lives Touched
Seed funding from Blume Ventures and Angels -
20 People
35 Clients
250K Lives Touched
Move to Sakinaka office- birth of the renegade startup -
90 People
60 Clients
1 Mn Lives Touched
Move to bigger office. Wriju Ray joins -
120 People
90 Clients
5 Mn Lives Touched
We onboard AirBnB and British Telecom
Machine Learnt Models launched... First customer ZebPay -
150 People
200 Clients
15 Mn Lives Touched
Regulations in Financial Services shift
-
240 People
320 Clients
35 Mn Lives Touched
Got ranked amongst Top100 RegTechs in the world
Onboarded Amazon and Dream11 as clients
Ashish Sahni joins as CTO -
280 People
500 Clients
70 Mn Lives Touched
HDFC Bank's Video KYC goes live
Onboarded 500K gig workers for e-commerce
Paritosh Desai joins as CPO -
360 People
850 Clients
100 Mn Lives Touched
TransUnion invests Rs. 86 Cr. (Series D)
Awarded ‘Fintech Scaleup of the year’
Moved to a new bigger office space