Kaarel Kotkas is founder and chief executive of Veriff, the Estonian identity-verification company. He grew up on a farm on Hiiumaa, a small island in Estonia, founded Veriff in 2015 at age 20, and has said the mission is to make online identity verification more secure than meeting someone in person.
Early ventures
As a teenager he co-founded an online temp firm in 2013 and an electronics firm in 2015 before starting Veriff the same year. Living on an island made the internet the main way to buy goods and talk to the outside world. He has described being asked to prove he was 18 for a debit account and finding how easy it was to change a birth date on a document, a moment that planted the Veriff idea even though he does not condone that behaviour.
Building Veriff
He built the company in Estonia, which he calls the birthplace of digital identity, then took it global after Y Combinator in 2018. Nordic Business Report named him among the 25 most influential young entrepreneurs in Northern Europe in 2018. Veriff markets a video-first approach and AI decisioning across thousands of ID types from more than 190 countries. In an Authority Magazine interview he told a story of an early outage at a major customer, bringing a bottle of whiskey and a transparent explanation, and keeping the account because the client valued how the team recovered.
"I have learned that advice always favors the giver, so that's something important to keep in mind as a young entrepreneur," he said of navigating counsel while making final decisions himself.