How Ashok Hariharan Built IDfy Into India's Trust Layer, and Gave 14.5% of It to His Team
A profitable identity company, one of the country's most generous ESOP pools, and a COVID with zero layoffs. Inside the IDfy founder's playbook for building ownership, and sharing it.
A job candidate walked into IDfy’s office a few years ago, looked around, and asked whether there was construction going on. There was a man asleep on a cot in one of the rooms, in shorts and a worn t-shirt. Not a construction worker, he was told. That was the CEO.
The irony is the point. Ashok Hariharan runs a company whose whole job is to confirm that people are who they say they are, and he is routinely mistaken for someone he is not. It is also the most useful way to understand him. IDfy now verifies more than 60 million identities a month for over 1,500 clients, including HDFC, Axis, Paytm and Zomato. The man who built that machine looks like he wandered in off the street, and he would take that as a compliment.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The bet nobody wanted
When Ashok started IDfy in Mumbai in 2011 with co-founder Vineet Jawa, fraud was not a category. Banks did not think India had a fraud problem, mostly because they were barely lending, so there was little to defraud. He had a resume that could have taken him anywhere else: high-speed network and graphics processors, a US stint at Laurel Networks in Pittsburgh, an MBA at ISB, a strategy role at British Telecom. Investors told him he was wasting it.
You’re a semiconductor guy, you used to build high-speed network processors. You want to do this crap is how people reacted.
He did it anyway, because he was chasing a single conviction.
I want to detect fraud in this country.
Only one backer, Blume Ventures, agreed, seeding the company with about 80 lakh in 2012. The early years were lean past the point of comfort. First-year revenue was 3.5 lakh. The team stayed between 12 and 25 people for years, and through 2015 IDfy had raised only around 200,000 dollars in total. This was the opposite of blitzscaling, and Ashok ignored the other received wisdom too, including the one about geography.
This VC narrative that only Bangalore exists is wrong.
The same contrarian streak shaped the engineering. Ashok runs a software company the way a chip company is run, where a mistake at the masking stage costs ten or twenty million dollars, so you design carefully before you build anything. He thinks software lost that discipline, and he names the culprit without flinching.
One of the worst things that happened to software design is Agile. It allowed you to not think at all.
That conviction shows up in the product: IDfy built its own small, purpose-built language models from 2019, chosen for explainability and low hallucination over the convenience of a general-purpose model. And it shows up in retention. By Ashok’s count, in fifteen years only one engineer has ever left engineering for product or sales. Treat the work and the people with respect, he argues, and they stay. Average tech tenure sits near three and a half years, and four of the original twelve are still in the building.
Sharing the upside
This is the part that makes IDfy worth studying. Most founders guard the cap table. Ashok’s reasoning runs the other way.
If I’m the only person making money, what am I going to do with it anyway? Beyond a point, you’re not going to take it beyond the grave.
So he carved out an ESOP pool of roughly 14 to 14.5 percent of the company, which by his own account puts IDfy in the top 5 percent of Indian startups for generosity, and built a set of mechanics that are unusual at almost every step. It begins at the offer, where every candidate is handed two numbers and told to choose.
We throw two numbers at you. ESOP plus salary, or just salary. You choose. After that, we know whether that person really cares.
The grants are concentrated rather than sprayed thin, because a token amount changes no one’s life. The vesting is deliberately flat.
We’ll do 25 percent every year. We are not doing this 10, 20, 30, 40, all of that nonsense.
And the strike price is anchored near early value rather than the last round, so people start in the money instead of underwater.
A lot of founders anchor it to the last round valuation. I think that’s a wrong move.
The same instinct showed up when it mattered most. When COVID hit and venture funding froze, Ashok made one decision and built everything else around it.
We decided we would not fire a single person, including the security guards who weren’t even on my payroll. We still paid them.
Instead of layoffs, the company ran a waterfall pay cut: senior leadership absorbed the deepest percentage, anyone earning under roughly 6 lakh took no hit at all, and every rupee was repaid within about four months. The instinct, he says, came from something his father taught him about bad karma finding you eventually.
The payoff, and the bet ahead
The patience has started to pay, and the numbers are worth stating plainly.
By the numbers
FY25 revenue: about 188.5 crore (roughly 186 crore from operations), up from 145 crore in FY24, with the company returning to profitability on a reported net profit of about 7.8 crore, against an 8.8 crore loss the year before.
Series F: 476 crore, about 53 million dollars, closed February 2026, led by Neo Asset Management’s Neo Secondaries Fund, with Blume Ventures, Elev8, IndiaMART, Kae Capital and Analog Capital. The round carried both primary and secondary capital, and reportedly valued IDfy near 2,420 crore, about 272 million dollars, per Fintrackr estimates.
Total raised: roughly 62 to 72 million dollars across about 12 rounds.
Scale: more than 60 million verifications a month, 1,500-plus clients, 150 million-plus lives, across India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
People: about 697 employees in mid-2025, rising toward 880 by early 2026.
The Series F secondary gave early backers and long-tenured staff a real exit. Then came the company’s first proper ESOP buyback, funded from primary capital, repurchasing vested options back into the pool. The most telling detail is how few people took it.
We had a number to hit. We only hit about one third of it. People are not selling.
In a buyback, low take-up is not a failure. It is a vote of confidence, people holding because they believe the bigger outcome is still ahead. IDfy is not a unicorn and has not gone public, and Ashok is in no hurry to manufacture either headline. The stated plan is an IPO in the 2026 to 2027 window, once revenue clears 300 to 500 crore.
His timing is good. Employee liquidity is having its strongest run in years: Indian startups bought back close to 220 million dollars of ESOPs in the first quarter of 2026 alone, more than the full-year totals for 2024 or 2025, with BrowserStack and Innovaccer leading.
Employees in India are taxed once as a salary perquisite when they exercise, and again as capital gains when they sell. A deferral exists for DPIIT-recognised startups, but only about 3,700 of nearly two lakh hold the certification, and the relief collapses the moment an employee leaves. The Union Budget 2026 left it untouched. Ashok’s workaround is old-fashioned: coach people to exercise early, and help them plan for the bill.
Fifteen years in, the trust broker still looks like he wandered in off the street, which, given what he sells, is exactly why you would trust him.
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Satish Mugulavalli