Launch HN: Didit (YC W26) – Stripe for Identity Verification

40 points - today at 3:08 PM


Hi HN, I’m Alberto. I co-founded Didit (https://didit.me) with my identical twin brother Alejandro. We are building a unified identity layer—a single integration that handles KYC, AML, biometrics, authentication, and fraud prevention globally. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTdcg7JCc4M&t=7s.

Being identical twins, we’ve spent our whole lives dealing with identity confusion, so it is a bit of irony that we ended up building a company to solve it for the internet.

Growing up in Barcelona, we spent years working on products where identity issues were a massive pain. We eventually realized that for most engineering teams, "global identity" is a fiction—in reality it is a fragmented mess. You end up stitching together one provider for US driver's licenses, another for NFC chip extraction in Europe, a third for AML screening, a fourth for government database validation in Brazil, a fifth for liveness detection on low-end Android devices, and yet another for biometric authentication and age estimation. Orchestrating these into a cohesive flow while adapting to localized regulations like GDPR or CCPA is a nightmare that makes no sense for most teams to be working on.

When we looked at the existing "enterprise" solutions, we were baffled. Most require a three-week sales cycle just to see a single page of documentation. Pricing is hidden behind "Contact Us" buttons, and the products themselves are often bloated legacy systems with high latency and abysmal accuracy.

We also noticed a recurring pattern: these tools are frequently optimized only for the latest iOS hardware, performing poorly on the mid-range or older Android devices that make up a huge percentage of the market. This results in a "leaky" funnel where legitimate users drop off due to technical friction and fraud goes undetected because data points are spread across disparate systems. Also, these systems are expensive, often requiring massive annual commits that price out early-stage startups.

We wanted to build a system that is accessible to everyone—a tool that works like Stripe for identity, where you can get a sandbox key in thirty seconds and start running real verifications with world-class UX and transparent pricing.

To solve this, we took the "delusional" path of full vertical integration. Rather than just wrapping existing APIs, we built our own ID verification and biometric AI models—from classification and fraud detection to OCR models for almost every language. This vertical integration is fundamental to how we handle user data. Because we own the entire stack, we control the flow of sensitive information from end-to-end. Your users' data doesn't get bounced around through a chain of third-party black boxes or regional middle-men. This allows us to provide a level of security and privacy that is impossible when you are just an orchestration layer for other people's APIs.

We believe that identity verification is one of the most critical problems on the internet, and must be solved correctly and ethically. Many people are rightfully skeptical, especially given recent news about projects that have turned identity into a tool for mass data collection or surveillance. We don’t do anything of the sort, but we also don’t want to be coerced in the future, so we facilitate data minimization on the customer side. Instead of a business asking for a full ID scan, we allow them to simply verify a specific attribute—like "is this person over 18?"—without ever seeing the document itself. Our goal is to move the industry away from data hoarding and toward zero knowledge, or at least minimal knowledge, verification.

The result of our all-in-one approach is a platform that increases onboarding rates while lowering identity costs. We’ve focused on building a high-confidence automated loop that reduces the need for manual review by up to 90%, catching sophisticated deepfakes and spoofing attempts that standard vision models miss. Our SDK is optimized for low bandwidth connections, ensuring it works on spotty 3G networks where legacy providers usually fail.

We are fully live, and you can jump into the dashboard at https://business.didit.me to see the workflow orchestration immediately. Our pricing is transparent and success-based; we don’t believe in hiding costs behind a sales call.

We’re here all day to answer any question—whether it’s about how we handle NFC verification, our approach to deepfake detection, the general ethics behind biometric data retention, or how we think about the future of identity. We’d love your brutal HN feedback on our APIs, platform, and integration flow!

Comments

JustSkyfall today at 8:16 PM
This is really cool (especially considering that the pricing is way better than Persona/Stripe Identity)!

That being said, what security measures does Didit take, and has it gone through e.g. auditing or SOC 2?

btown today at 4:02 PM
Great to see innovation in this space!

If I could make one giant request, it's around giving (properly authorized) humans the ability to override the system when needed. When you make a simple API, it's all too common for a company integrating the solution to rely entirely on the identity service's yes-no outcome. But all too commonly, there's no way to override a decision, or bypass the need for identification.

In the travel space, I've seen situations, especially with luxury and celebrity clients, where there's human levels of trust across the board, all parties are agreed at senior levels that they'd like to fulfill with a one-off exception to identity verification... but the technology refuses to let them proceed without going through the full verification flow, and if they're integrated in the simplest way, there's no "escape hatch" on the integration's side.

And similarly, if a person happens to trigger false negatives on video matches (say, due to medical reasons) giving support teams an ability to build exceptions is key. Having a way to tell the system "for this transaction/account ID, when they get to this node in the flow, let them through as if checks proceeded, or treat them as pre-authorized" would set you apart.

(Obviously, for things involving KYC, there's a lot of considerations around permissioning - but for many use cases, you want to empower senior support teams.)

vm64 today at 5:37 PM
Congrats on the launch! Hard to judge from just demo videos but the flow seems much nicer than those I’ve encountered in many apps.

A couple questions:

1. Given that one of your offerings is a wallet for identity, how do you handle storing user biometric data and documents

2. I’m surprised AI age detection based on faces is accurate enough to be used for account decisions. Is there any specific standard your models are held too and why would someone prefer it over an ID document proving age?

mbettie today at 6:32 PM
Love the focus on KYC. I've always wondered why there isn't a centralized identity verification process that makes it easy for beneficial owner reporting for companies. Every financial institution collects this and it's still a manual process that requires inputting the same info over and over again.
mchusma today at 7:44 PM
I like that it lets you specify the types of accepted docs. The biggest issue i have with Stripe identity verification product right now. And biometric re-log in is also great. Will check it out.
olalonde today at 5:19 PM
There are a bunch of competing companies in that space but it's true that transparent pricing and self-service is rare. Good idea to focus on that.
thesiti92 today at 5:01 PM
with all this talk about persona/discord sending identities to the dhs and everything, what steps do you guys take to keep identity information private?
fduran today at 4:08 PM
Suerte! Unrelated, growing up in Spain it always baffled me that identification was based on a photo on your DNI. Stories of siblings or even friends that had a passing resemblance to each other sharing DNIs was a common story.
personality1 today at 5:44 PM
Any plans for B2B verification?
keepamovin today at 3:16 PM
Stripe has a pretty good identity system already. What do you think of it?
toomuchtodo today at 4:02 PM
Who would you say is your primary competitor (besides Stripe) and how are you better than them today?
throw03172019 today at 3:24 PM
“Stripe for XXXX” is an odd description when Stripe does the XXXX feature.

What do you guys do different?

(Stripe identity customer)

neya today at 3:32 PM
Here's a better idea: Eradicate requirement of the most personal details of someone to do basic tasks...such as using a web application.

Unless it's a government organisation, no private provider should have the ability to use or process people's identities. It's too much power in one entity's hands. I wish someone would actually solve this instead of yet another ID solutions. We all saw how a literal job seeking app (LinkedIn) abused this.

shablulman today at 3:23 PM
[dead]
yuppiepuppie today at 3:32 PM
Nice to see a Spanish startup in YC :) Good luck!
bambax today at 4:46 PM
Didit?

I certainly didn't do it.

burntpineapple today at 3:31 PM
[flagged]