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Posted by rosasalberto 6 hours ago

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

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!

39 points | 41 commentspage 2
throw03172019 5 hours ago|
“Stripe for XXXX” is an odd description when Stripe does the XXXX feature.

What do you guys do different?

(Stripe identity customer)

rosasalberto 5 hours ago|
Stripe builds great products, including identity. But it’s not a specialized identity platform.

A few differences: - Limited global document coverage (not all IDs or countries supported). https://docs.stripe.com/identity - No advanced workflow orchestration for complex identity flows - Missing features like NFC chip verification - Pricing similar to traditional IDV vendors (expensive)

Stripe Identity works well inside the Stripe ecosystem, but companies that need more flexible, global identity infrastructure usually look for specialized solutions.

neya 5 hours ago||
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.

rosasalberto 5 hours ago||
We actually agree with the core concern.

Right now the internet has a terrible model where every company asks for your ID and stores it themselves. That means your identity data ends up scattered across dozens of databases.

We think the future is privacy-preserving identity and reusability: verify once, keep your identity in your own wallet, and only share minimal proofs (e.g. “over 18” or “real human”) instead of your full identity every time.

That’s the direction we’re building toward with SSI / identity wallets and reusable verification.

eks391 2 hours ago||
This is neat. I had a conversation recently basically concluding that "it would be nice if an identity solution existed where [everything you just said, consolidation of identity, but only providing the minimum for regulation, like age, location, or is-human, depending on the law a site is trying to follow], instead of [all the gross examples of identity consolidation abuse seen today and the source for ID company distrust]". I hope luck for you, so your product both maintains the vision long term, sustains market share for longevity purposes, and sets a standard for others to follow.
yuppiepuppie 5 hours ago|||
Id say this is a valid criticism of the b2c market (esp. for social networks). but there still is a viable b2b market where kyb/c is not as intrusive - and sometimes a regulatory requirement (finance, health, etc.).
mothballed 5 hours ago||
These 'identity verification' companies end up becoming a main enemy of this pursuit. Their own revenue relies on legislation that assures their existence.
shablulman 5 hours ago||
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yuppiepuppie 5 hours ago||
Nice to see a Spanish startup in YC :) Good luck!
rosasalberto 5 hours ago|
thanks! Spanish founders mog!
bambax 4 hours ago||
Didit?

I certainly didn't do it.

burntpineapple 5 hours ago|
[flagged]
dang 5 hours ago||
Personal attacks are not allowed here. No more of this, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rosasalberto 5 hours ago||
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StriverGuy 5 hours ago||
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