Persona Identities, Inc.

Is Persona publicly traded?
No. Persona Identities, Inc. is a private company and does not trade on any stock exchange. Its latest valuation was $2 billion in April 2025.

Who founded Persona?
Rick Song and Charles Yeh founded the company in San Francisco in 2018. Song is CEO and Yeh is CTO; both previously worked on fraud and identity products at Square.

How much has Persona raised?
Persona has raised approximately $417 million in total funding, including a $200 million Series D in April 2025 co-led by Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital.

Who uses Persona?
Publicly named customers include OpenAI, LinkedIn, Reddit, Etsy, Twilio, and Block, alongside earlier wins such as Postmates, Outdoorsy, and UrbanSitter.

Is Persona owned by a bigger company?
No. Persona is independent and venture-backed. It has no corporate parent and has not been acquired.

Rick Song and Charles Yeh founded Persona in San Francisco in 2018. The pair had been friends and roommates for nearly a decade, and Song had built fraud and identity risk products at Square, where he saw how companies cobbled identity checks together with manual review teams in Eastern Europe and aging vendor software.

The founding bet was that identity could be software: a unified platform where a company configures verification flows from building blocks instead of outsourcing review headcount. That let Persona price like a SaaS product against incumbents charging for manual review.

Early venture backing came from First Round Capital and Coatue, whose Thomas Laffont wrote a seed check in 2018 and invested in every round through Series D. Early customers skewed toward marketplaces and gig platforms, including Postmates, Outdoorsy, and UrbanSitter.

The company raised a $150 million Series C in October 2022 at a $1.5 billion valuation, achieving unicorn status during a market downturn. Customer wins broadened into social platforms and AI companies: LinkedIn, Reddit, Etsy, Twilio, Block, and OpenAI.

Persona signed roughly $100 million in annual contracts during 2024. On April 30, 2025, it announced a $200 million Series D co-led by Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital at a $2 billion valuation, with BOND, Coatue, First Round, Index Ventures, and Chemistry participating. The round was framed around identity for an agentic AI world: verifying not only humans but the agents acting on their behalf.

As of October 2026 Persona remains private and independent, with offices in San Francisco and New York and a workforce distributed across about 14 countries.

Security incident disclosure (2024): Persona disclosed a security incident after researchers flagged a third-party exposure involving a credential tied to one of its cloud environments. The company stated customer verification data was not affected and published its remediation steps. Coverage debated the incident's scope, and it remains the most-discussed security event in the company's history.

Biometric privacy exposure (ongoing): Identity verification vendors process biometric data, which falls under statutes like Illinois' BIPA that have produced heavy litigation across the industry. Persona has not been found in violation, but the regulatory class applies to the category it operates in, and its customers push compliance obligations downstream.

Identity-verification policy debate (ongoing): Civil liberties groups criticize the trend toward verified-identity internet access, arguing it erodes online anonymity. Persona is frequently cited in that coverage because of its visible customer base, though it supplies tools rather than mandates.