Persona Identities, Inc. is an American identity verification company headquartered in San Francisco. The company develops infrastructure for businesses to verify individuals and organizations, manage user onboarding, and comply with KYC/AML requirements. Persona is a consumer-facing platform.
The company was founded in 2018 by Charles Yeh and Rick Song, who were former engineers at Dropbox and Square, respectively. Persona was originally positioned as providing identity verification to prevent fraud. Song explained that "we found identity was critical for anything from account recovery to verifying for fraud, or building trust and safety for a delivery, to ensuring there's trust between two peers for transferring money." In contrast to other identity management vendors, the company did not focus on a specific industry, with its initial clients ranging from fintech companies to food delivery and short-term rental providers.
In February 2026, Persona became the subject of controversy for its work with the U.S. government's Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program after a security researcher's discovery of publicly exposed code from the identity-services company.
PersonaâÂÂs platform provides document and biometric identity verification for compliance with know your customer (KYC) regulations. Its technologies also include proprietary selfie "liveness" checks.
Persona has increasingly been used for age verification to comply with age assurance laws for social media services, including the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act 2023 and Australia's Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024, and various state-level legislation in the United States, as well as by companies, such as OpenAI, to prevent exposure to sensitive or adult content by minors.
Persona and other thirdâÂÂparty age verification providers have been cited in broader debates about the privacy and security implications of online age checks. News coverage of RedditâÂÂs UK rollout focused on short photo retention windows and the separation of user account data from verification data, while also highlighting civil liberties concerns about expanding age restrictions online.