Veriff buys former employee's startup Vespia to build out KYB

Veriff has acquired Vespia, an Estonian Know Your Business (KYB) technology provider, as the Tallinn-based identity verification firm pushes into business checks alongside its core identity work. The companies did not disclose the price of the deal, announced on 5 February.

The acquisition is notable beyond the technology: Vespia's co-founder and chief executive, Julia Ront, was Veriff's second employee, joining founder Kaarel Kotkas in the company's early days before leaving to start her own venture. She co-founded Vespia in 2021 with Anton Vedešin, building a platform that lets companies verify businesses in real time across more than 300 jurisdictions, including shareholder and ultimate-beneficial-owner checks and configurable onboarding workflows.

From identity checks to business checks

Veriff built its business on verifying individuals: scanning documents, matching faces and flagging fraud for companies that need to know who their customers are. KYB is a related but distinct problem. It requires checking that a business itself is legitimate, who owns it, and whether it appears on sanctions or shareholder registries, rather than confirming a single person's identity.

Buying Vespia gives Veriff a KYB engine it did not build in-house. That beats developing one from scratch or licensing data feeds from third parties. The company said the Vespia team will join Veriff and that it plans to integrate the technology so KYB becomes commercially available across its platform by the middle of 2026.

Kotkas framed the deal as an attempt to overhaul a notoriously slow corner of compliance work rather than patch it.

"KYB has historically been slow, manual, and painful. We don't want to fix it incrementally; we want to fundamentally rethink it," said Kaarel Kotkas, founder and chief executive of Veriff, adding that the goal is real-time, end-to-end KYB built to the same standard as the rest of its platform.

Why it matters for Veriff's roadmap

The company has raised around $177m since it was founded in 2015, including a $100m round led by Tiger Global and Alkeon in January 2022, and now employs more than 500 people. Its customer base spans fintech, mobility, gaming and marketplace platforms such as Bolt, Deel, Monzo, Trustpilot and Webull, according to the company.

Adding KYB moves the firm toward selling a broader trust bundle rather than a single verification product. That mirrors what larger compliance vendors elsewhere in Europe and the US have done as fintechs and marketplaces look to consolidate vendors instead of stitching together separate tools for identity, business and transaction screening. A single vendor covering both individual and business verification can mean fewer integrations for buyers, and one point of accountability when compliance checks fail.

Ront said the deal lets Vespia's technology reach more customers than it could as a standalone company.

"We proved that business verification can be fast and global. Being part of Veriff, we can now scale that work within a larger, unified trust platform," said Julia Ront, co-founder and chief executive of Vespia.

An Estonian hire turned Estonian acquisition

The deal also underlines how tightly linked Estonia's startup scene remains. Ront left Veriff to build Vespia, and five years later her company is being folded back into the business where she got her start. It is a pattern that is becoming more common as Baltic founders who trained at one scale-up go on to start and later sell ventures to the same circle of companies and investors.

Terms were not disclosed, including the price paid or how many people are joining through the deal. The real test comes by the middle of 2026, when the combined KYB product is due to go live commercially, and buyers get to judge whether a single-vendor trust platform actually works better than the piecemeal approach it is meant to replace.