EXIT: Icebreaker.vc portfolio company Vespia has been acquired by Veriff
Identity verification unicorn Veriff has acquired Vespia, an AI-powered KYB (Know-Your-Business) startup. The deal marks Veriff's expansion towards a broader, single-vendor trust platform.
This acquisition brings Julia Ront, Veriff's second-ever employee and co-founder of Vespia, back to the team. After helping shape Veriff in its early days, Julia went on to found Vespia and spent the last five years obsessing over the same KYB challenges Veriff is determined to solve.
"KYB has historically been slow, manual, and painful," Kaarel Kotkas, founder and CEO of Veriff, said in a statement. "We don't want to fix it incrementally; we want to rethink it fundamentally. Do it 10 times better than it has been done before – real-time, end-to-end KYB from a single platform built to the same standard our customers expect from Veriff. That's how KYB will work going forward."
Commenting on the exit on LinkedIn, Aleksi Partanen, General Partner at Icebreaker.vc, said: When Julia and Anton came to us with the thesis that Know-Your-Business verification was broken, slow, manual, fragmented across jurisdictions, I saw founders who understood the problem from the inside out, domain experts, as we call them. That Vespia now joins Veriff to power a single-vendor trust platform feels like the most natural next chapter, proof that deep domain conviction, paired with speed, creates outcomes that no pivot deck ever could."
As part of the acquisition, the Vespia team will join Veriff, and the technology will be integrated, making KYB commercially available across Veriff's platform by mid-2026.
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