What's the backstory of BlueCheck, and how did it come to be?

BlueCheck was officially founded in 2014 by Alex Zeig, our current CEO.
Mike Affuso, current VP of Operations and co-founder, was the first employee and joined in early 2015. BlueCheck was initially based in New York and ran out of temporary office space.

In mid-2015, the company relocated to Austin, Texas. Although much of our team reside in the area, we have expanded our team nationwide to give you the quality of service you deserve.

The original premise for BlueCheck was to build a better consumer ID system for digital use-cases. Our first product was a consumer-facing ID Verification product used in the dating and dual-sided marketplace industries. It is also why the company's name is "BlueCheck" -> like a blue checkmark for all verifications.

Shortly after that, it became clear there was a need for a solution that would provide age verification for e-commerce stores selling restricted items. As a result, age verification was our first actual "scaled" product and continues to be a pillar of our business today.

As the Age Verification product scaled, we started seeing issues with the amount of photo ID verifications that needed to be processed. We began work on our Photo ID Verification product shortly after and made improvements that we needed. As we continued to grow our total daily verifications, we continued to add in features or automation that allowed us to scale more efficiently.

As our Photo ID Verification product became robust and efficient, we started receiving inbounds asking us if we could solely process photo IDs for businesses. Photo ID Verification marked our second product, and several highly high-trafficked companies signed on almost immediately.

What about the company?

Sure thing! Happily, we are majority employee-owned and have been since the start of BlueCheck.  While we have a few outside investors, current employees own most of our equity and continue to accrue stock. We believe it's critical to maintain a healthy company growth rate and foster a great work environment.

Additionally, we built our business around each employee playing an outsized role compared to a traditional corporate structure. As a result, we have a couple of handfuls of employees and many large handfuls of contractors. This flexible work arrangement works well for us in a post-office space world and keeps our costs low. Furthermore, we spend considerable resources on automation and efficiency, which helps us run a more extensive operation than most companies our size. This "dogfooding" usually gets passed directly onto our clients regarding new features, automation, or efficiency gains in our existing products.

Another item you may notice on our site is a lack of client logos. As mentioned numerous times on our web pages, we currently service hundreds of enterprises. However, because of the nature of our products and client businesses, we typically prefer to restrict too much client info as it creates targets for fraudsters, pranksters, and general not-do-gooders to try and beat our systems.

Put differently, when your Age or Identity Verification Platform is continuously probed and targeted by various actors of different levels of commitment/technical skill, we have learned to err on the side of caution and restrict general info.

We are, of course, more than happy to discuss referrals or clients over the phone or in conversation. It's just not something we need to market to the world.

Can you share more about the COVID-19 product?

In mid-2021, we started to receive requests from larger enterprises interested in tailoring our photo ID verification platform to verify vaccine cards and test results.  

After working through the initial build stage, this became our third full-fledged product and quickly scaled out.  Building this product wouldn't have been possible without many previous iterations and learning from our last two verification products.  Many database connections and machine learning modules are direct port-overs from our other products, just tweaked slightly to support the new use case.

Additionally, we are excited about an eventual return to "consumer" facing digital ID.  We hope to expand the product away from solely enterprise requirements and enable consumers to find utility for it instead of carrying a physical pdf cardstock around.  "Consumer" facing digital ID is an area in active development but has enormous potential to make a significant impact on how we implement digital credentialing systems. :)