Kaarel Kotkas

CEO & Founder, Veriff

Kaarel is the strategic thinker and visionary behind Veriff — an Estonian identity verification provider that recently
closed a financing round worth 100 million US dollars, valuing the firm at 1.5 billion US dollars and making Veriff
the ninth Estonian unicorn, following the success of Skype, Playtech, Wise, Bolt, Pipedrive, Zego, ID.me, and Gelato.

Under Kaarel’s leadership, Veriff has become a leader in the identity verification market, currently the only service
provider offering near-real-time verification (improving from 70 seconds to 6 seconds in 2020), with sophisticated
fraud control delivering close to 99% decision accuracy. Kaarel’s emphasis on global impact has led Veriff’s
AI-powered decision engine to analyze more than 9,550 variations of government-issued IDs from over 190
countries in 39 different languages. In 2020, Kaarel was named the EY Entrepreneur of the Year in Estonia. Also,
Nordic Business Report named Kaarel one of the 25 most influential young entrepreneurs in Northern Europe in
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