Stephen Ufford decided to be an entrepreneur right after high school. Not after a degree, not after a corporate job. His first idea was online credit reports, because he had looked at how consumers got theirs and found the process outdated.
That company was iQuiri, launched in 2000. It was one of the early businesses to put consumer credit reports and scores online, and it was acquired within three years. Ufford did not stop. He built two more companies in very similar markets, and both were acquired too. Trulioo, he has said, was his fourth startup.
At the time of that interview the company had raised over US$25 million.
So he arrived in Vancouver in 2011, with co-founder Tanis Jorge, already a veteran of data-driven businesses and already knowing the hard part. Data was the business, and data belongs to someone else. To verify who a person is online, you need access to records held by banks, governments and credit bureaus, country by country.
That was the work of the early years. Trulioo set out to offer what Ufford described as instant electronic identity and address verification, with a goal of reaching four billion people in more than 60 countries. At the time of that interview the company had raised over US$25 million. Growth meant persuading one data source after another to let a small Vancouver company plug into it.
The first real validation came in 2014 with a US$6 million Series A led by Tenfore Holdings, joined by BDC Capital and Blumberg Capital. A year later American Express Ventures put money in alongside those backers. The company launched its international identity verification platform in 2014.
Then the numbers grew. In 2019 Trulioo raised US$70 million, including a US$60 million Series C led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity. In 2021 came a US$394 million Series D led by TCV at a US$1.75 billion valuation, which made it a unicorn.
Later years brought acquisitions, offices in Dublin, Singapore and San Diego, a rebrand in 2023 and a new CEO, Vicky Bindra, in 2025.
For founders, the quiet pattern is repetition. Ufford chose one unglamorous problem, trust between strangers online, and had already spent more than a decade learning how data markets work before he built the company that made it a unicorn.