Alberto and Alejandro Rosas once made their living volleying on professional tennis courts. These days, the identical twins are serving up something different: a challenge to the identity verification industry that reads like a provocation.
Their startup, Didit, claims it can verify users 70% cheaper than established players like Sumsub and Veriff—and do it just as fast. Maybe faster, if you believe the marketing materials.
It's the kind of pitch that makes veteran enterprise buyers skeptical. Too cheap usually means corners cut somewhere. But the Y Combinator-backed company insists it's simply rebuilt what others have bloated into expensive complexity. The verification stack—document checks, liveness detection, biometric authentication, AML screening, fraud prevention—all in one platform. And the first 500 checks each month? Free.
"We rebuilt the entire IDV stack from scratch," the company says in its YC Winter 2026 profile, where it lists over 700 active B2B customers and claims 20% month-over-month growth.
The 12-person team, based in San Francisco, raised roughly $2 million in December 2025 from Y Combinator, Hypersphere, SaaSholic, and Masia VC. Now they're preparing for YC's Demo Day on March 24, where they'll pitch a room full of investors hunting for the next infrastructure play that actually pencils out.
Whether a startup this small can unseat entrenched competitors with decade-long customer relationships and enterprise sales armies—well, that's the bet.
The Platform Behind the Promise
Didit V2, which went live in June 2025, doesn't position itself as a point solution. It's modular. The system handles document verification across more than 4,000 document types from 220-plus countries, with AI-powered OCR that processes 130 languages.
Liveness detection—the technology that confirms a real human is present, not a photo or deepfake—comes in three configurations: passive, 3D flash, and a hybrid "3D Action & Flash" mode. The company claims 99.9% accuracy with a false acceptance rate below 0.1%. Those are competitive numbers, though independent verification at scale would be the real proof.
The feature set looks like it was designed by someone who's read every compliance checklist twice. Biometric authentication for returning users. One-to-one face matching. Proof of address verification. AML screening with ongoing monitoring. NFC passport scanning. Age estimation. Database validation.
There's also reusable KYC functionality—verify once, then share your credentials across multiple Didit-integrated apps with user consent and biometric re-authentication. That's appealing in theory, though adoption depends on how many platforms actually integrate.
For developers, there are hosted sessions, web SDKs for React, Vue, and Angular, in-context iframes, and native Android SDKs. React Native and Flutter developers get WebView implementations while they wait for native versions.
Free Doesn't Always Mean What You Think
Here's where things get interesting. Or confusing, depending on how closely you read the fine print.
Didit markets "core KYC" as free. The homepage and documentation reference "500 free checks per month" for core verification features. The English pricing page goes further: "Core KYC is Free. Period… the only platform on Earth that gives you core KYC for free, forever… No usage caps."
But the French pricing FAQ clarifies something slightly different: "500 vérifications par fonctionnalité, par organisation" monthly, resetting each month. So perhaps there are caps, just generous ones.
For context, Sumsub charges $1.35 per verification on its basic plan with a $149 monthly minimum. Persona offers 500 free verifications per month for up to 12 months through its startup program—but only for a year. Didit is betting that "free forever" pulls in developers who don't want to worry about usage creeping into paid territory.
Beyond the free tier, standalone API pricing is transparent: passive liveness at $0.05, face matching at $0.05, AML screening at $0.35, proof of address at $0.50, email verification at $0.03. Phone verification runs $0.04 plus carrier fees.
It's an aggressive pricing strategy. Whether it's sustainable depends entirely on unit economics the company hasn't disclosed.
The Speed Question
In identity verification, speed matters. Friction kills conversion rates.
Didit's marketing materials claim verifications complete in under 10 seconds on the demos page, under 15 seconds in developer documentation, and—notably—under two seconds on the Indonesian product page for ID verification specifically.
Those timelines vary wildly. Perhaps they're accurate across different verification types, or perhaps someone in marketing got creative with the lowest possible benchmark.
For comparison, Veriff's implementation with logistics platform Zego reportedly "usually takes around 6 seconds," though other Veriff implementations can stretch to several minutes when manual review is triggered. Third-party reviews suggest Sumsub verifications complete in under 50 seconds on average.
Whether Didit's sub-10-second claims hold across all document types, network conditions, and liveness modes is something that will only become clear at scale. Right now, with 700 customers, the platform hasn't faced the kind of volume that breaks infrastructure.
The company has secured ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018 certifications, along with iBeta Level 1 (ISO 30107-3) certification for liveness detection. That's table stakes in an industry where deepfake fraud attempts have reportedly surged more than 2,000% in recent years—a statistic vendors love to cite, though measuring baseline fraud rates is notoriously difficult.
Customers Who Actually Switched
The twins can point to real wins. Not just pilot programs—actual migrations from incumbent platforms.
Crnogorski Telekom, part of the Deutsche Telekom group in Montenegro, claims an 80% reduction in per-verification costs after switching to Didit, with onboarding times cut to under 30 seconds. GBTC Finance, a digital banking platform, reports a 90% reduction in compliance costs. Freight marketplace Shiply says it reduced manual verification tasks by more than 50%.
Those are customer-reported numbers, not audited figures. But they're specific enough to be checkable.
The company also partnered with Orange under the GSMA Open Gateway initiative, announced at Mobile World Congress 2024, to integrate telco network APIs for SIM swap detection and number verification. That's a meaningful partnership—telco APIs are increasingly important for anti-fraud measures, especially in regions where document fraud is rampant.
Web3 talent network Bondex built Didit into its reputation system, with documentation noting that "verifications are typically approved instantly."
The marketing materials now claim the platform is "trusted by +1000 companies worldwide," though the YC company page lists 700-plus active B2B customers. That discrepancy might reflect trial users versus paying clients, or it might reflect marketing departments doing what marketing departments do.
What Happens Next
The broader identity verification market is projected to grow somewhere between 9% and 13% annually through the early 2030s, depending on which analyst report you trust. Growth drivers are predictable: regulatory requirements expanding, fraud rising, digital-first onboarding becoming the standard.
But growth in a market doesn't automatically translate to growth for a specific player, particularly one without the brand recognition or enterprise sales infrastructure of competitors who've been at this for a decade.
Didit's December 2025 blog post stated the company was "close to profitability" with over 20% month-over-month growth and 300%-plus net revenue retention at the six-month mark. Those are encouraging metrics if they hold. Net revenue retention above 300% suggests customers are dramatically expanding usage—or that the initial customer base was so small that a few upsells swing the percentage wildly.
For now, Didit is betting on a land-and-expand strategy: pull in startups with free tier economics and developer-friendly integration, then lock them in as they scale. It's the classic SaaS playbook, executed in a market where switching costs are high once you've built verification workflows into your product.
The twins who once competed on tennis courts are playing a different game now.
One where the serve is priced at zero, and the opponent is anyone charging monthly minimums.
Whether that's enough to win is something Demo Day investors—and the next few quarters—will answer.
