ID.me

ID.me, founded in 2010 by Blake Hall and Matt Thompson and headquartered in McLean, Virginia, operates one of the largest identity-verification networks tied to U.S. government services. Rather than selling a per-application authentication product, ID.me runs a network model: a person verifies their identity once, using government-issued ID, biometrics and other signals, and can then reuse that verified credential to sign in across the more than 21 federal agencies, 50 state agencies and 70-plus healthcare organizations that rely on ID.me — a base the company says now exceeds 156 million users.

That government footprint has come with real scrutiny as well as real scale. In 2022, the IRS’s plan to require ID.me facial recognition for taxpayers accessing online accounts drew significant public and congressional pushback over privacy and accuracy concerns, and the agency ultimately dropped the facial-recognition requirement in favor of alternative verification options. That episode is well documented in independent press coverage and is relevant context alongside ID.me’s growth: it shows both how central the company had become to federal identity infrastructure and the limits of how far agencies were willing to push biometric mandates on its platform.

Commercially, ID.me has continued to scale past that controversy: reported 2024 revenue of roughly $150 million ARR, a valuation in the $1.8-2 billion range as of 2025, and financing that includes a $275 million credit facility from Ares Management secured in January 2025. For CISOs and IT leaders at organizations that must verify identity against government-issued credentials at scale — benefits administration, healthcare eligibility, tax-adjacent services — ID.me is one of the few vendors with the federal and state relationships to do that natively, though its history invites scrutiny of specific accuracy and privacy claims rather than blanket acceptance of vendor marketing.