How Ashok Hariharan Built IDfy Into India's Trust Infrastructure, One Crisis at a Time
A 15-year journey from ₹80 lakh seed round to ₹188 crore in revenue - and why the biggest growth wave is still ahead
Bombay, 2009. Ashok Hariharan was hiring for his struggling EdTech startup when he noticed something odd. Three candidates had submitted identical resumes for the same position. Word-for-word identical, including the grammatical error: “I will be working at Infosys for the last three years.”
1,600 people applied. Three applied with the same resume, word for word, including grammatical mistakes. We called them over for an interview and realized obviously they were lying.
That moment crystallized a problem Ashok had been circling around: India’s digital economy was being built on a foundation of unverifiable claims. While the country was racing toward smartphone ubiquity and digital payments, the basic infrastructure of trust - knowing whether people are who they claim to be - remained analog, manual, and broken.
Fifteen years later, that insight has become IDfy, a company processing millions of verifications daily and posting ₹188.5 crore in revenue for FY25 while maintaining profitability. But the path from fraud detection to trust infrastructure wasn’t a straight line. It was a masterclass in what Ashok calls “incremental compounding” - surviving long enough for the market to catch up to your architecture.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Education of a Trust Architect
Ashok didn’t set out to build a business empire. Born into a Tamil Brahmin family where education was revered over wealth (”In our house, there’s only a Saraswati Puja. We don’t do Lakshmi Puja”), he spent his early career building high-speed network processors in the U.S. semiconductor industry before returning to India in 2003.
After an MBA at ISB and a brief stint in strategy at British Telecom (‘such a boring job’), he co-founded Gaboli in 2008, attempting to build India’s answer to Coursera. When that morphed into a services business he had no interest in running, he pivoted to what would become IDfy in 2011, focusing on background verification for the HR industry.
The early years tested his resolve. After raising ₹80 lakhs from Blume Ventures in 2012, the company’s first year revenue was just ₹3.5 lakhs. By late 2013, with only two months of runway remaining and a co-founder departing, Ashok gathered his 12-person team expecting resignations.
I told all of them, hey, we have two months of money left. If you guys want to leave, I completely understand. Those 12 guys got up and said, don’t pay us for whatever number of months until you get your next round of funding.
Four of those original twelve remain with the company. Ashok calls them “the 12 Apostles,” a founding myth that’s now embedded in IDfy’s cultural DNA.
For the next several years, revenue barely moved. Even after a $3.5 million Series A in 2015, IDfy plateaued around ₹11 crore annually. During this period, a prominent VC called Ashok in for what he thought would be a funding discussion. Instead, the investor tried recruiting him away from his own company: “He tells me, ‘What are you doing? Why are you running that stupid company? Background verification is such a shitty business.’”
But Ashok kept building. OCR engines. Face-matching algorithms. Low-bandwidth video systems. Technology for problems that didn’t yet exist at scale.
Three Crises, Three Inflection Points
Then the market arrived, in waves.
December 2015: The Uber rape case triggered regulatory mandates for driver verification. IDfy, which had already built mobile-based OCR technology for blue-collar workers, scaled from 150 verifications monthly to 4,000 daily. Revenue jumped from ₹1 crore to ₹3.5 crore within a year.
2018: The Supreme Court struck down third-party Aadhaar verification, killing startups that had built their entire stack around the e-KYC API. IDfy survived because its background verification legacy meant it could verify driving licenses, PAN cards, and voter IDs - capabilities others had ignored.
Guys who completely relied on the Aadhaar stack actually failed miserably. We kind of had a larger remit because of the BGV business.
March 2020: COVID-19 crashed IDfy’s revenue from ₹2 crore monthly to ₹30 lakhs. The entire team took massive pay cuts (leadership at 20% of salary). But when the RBI authorized Video KYC for remote customer onboarding, IDfy was ready with technology that worked at 60 kbps bandwidth - better than Zoom for India’s patchy network infrastructure.
The company now powers roughly 60% of all Video KYC transactions in India.
The results: From ₹20 crore in FY20, IDfy grew to ₹57 crore (FY22), ₹118 crore (FY23), ₹144 crore (FY24), and ₹188.5 crore (FY25), while returning to profitability with ₹7.8 crore in net profit.
Ashok keeps calling it luck. But the pattern is clear: build infrastructure before demand materializes, survive long enough for regulation to arrive, capture the market when competitors scramble.
You survive long enough, luck will happen at some point. The surface area is longer.
The Next Wave: Privacy as Infrastructure
Today, IDfy operates three integrated platforms. OnboardIQ handles identity verification. OneRisk, built on the acquisition of CrimeCheck’s 330 million court records database, detects fraud patterns traditional credit bureaus miss - including a registry of 150,000 companies that issue fake employment certificates complete with real salary credits and PF contributions.
And then there’s Privy, launched two years before India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act rules were finalized. With compliance becoming mandatory by May 2027, every company handling personal data in India will need systems for consent management and data governance. Once again, Ashok built the answer before the market asked the question.
The company now employs 800 people with a 15% ESOP pool (among the largest in Indian tech) and has expanded to the Philippines and Indonesia, where it’s already the number two player. International revenue, zero 18 months ago, now contributes 15% of the total.
At a Series E valuation of approximately $125 million and with profitability re-established, Ashok is eyeing an IPO in the 2026-2027 window, targeting ₹300-500 crore in revenue before listing.
We’ll do IPO at some point for sure, sooner than later. But the ultimate goal is bigger. I want to be at the center of every sensitive transaction in the country.
What makes IDfy unusual isn’t the technology or the timing. It’s the patience. In an ecosystem that celebrates blitzscaling, Ashok spent eight years building capabilities while revenue stayed flat, investing in AI models and data infrastructure when competition was still using Excel sheets.
The resume fraud that started it all? It’s now part of a proprietary database that helps banks spot synthetic identities before loans are disbursed. The infrastructure of trust, it turns out, is built slowly - tested through crisis, ready when the market finally arrives.
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