Smile Identity

I'm Mark, the CEO and Co-founder.

I’ve spent half my career working on access to credit in developing economies.

My Co-founder and CTO Bill has spent 20 years building secure hardware and software systems.

Mobile money and mobile Internet access are growing quickly in frontier markets like Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, but larger financial products (loans, insurance, savings accounts) and shared economy business models (ride-sharing, delivery, house-sharing) are limited by weak systems of trust and identity.

It is still risky to loan money over the phone to mobile users you don't know, even though it is quite profitable once you remove fraud. This is particularly the case in Africa where credit bureaus cover less than 10% of the population and most archaic national ID systems can't be digitally queried.

We are building a new standard in on-mobile customer enrollment and authentication that takes advantage of recent advances in computer vision and machine learning and the proliferation of Android devices as a primary means of computing for most new Internet users around the world.

Our value proposition serves a spectrum of companies from financial services, to healthcare to shared economy firms. We give them a way to quickly and elegantly onboard a user and verify his or her identity, as well as recall that profile for later authentication.

I've had a front-row seat as India solved its identity challenges with the most successful implementation of biometrics ever: India's Universal ID system (“Aadhaar”). At Smile Identity we are working on a private, light-weight version of Aadhaar that can be done without reliance on massive government agent networks or specialized hardware.

Bill joined me because his own son was working in this space and showed him the opportunity and the need for a solution.
He realized this was the most compelling application of the computer vision technology he was already working on.

We are building Smile Identity to expand trust in places where verifying one's identity is critical to accessing to life-changing products and opportunities.

Our hiring process is straight-forward. A 30 minute screening call with me, the CEO.
A 45 minute technical interview with my co-founder Bill, the CTO.
And a 90 minute in person interview with both co-founders and members of our technical team.

We are hiring quickly because we have customers waiting on us to deliver and we need to meet their aggressive timelines.
This is a company that is about to take off and the next person who joins us is going to be in for an adventure.