Kaarel Kotkas

CEO & Founder, Veriff

Role: Associate

Site: CDL-Estonia

Stream: Digital Society

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 2018.