Sacra estimates that ID.me generated $130 million in revenue in 2023.

ID.me’s revenue scales with successful identity outcomes rather than seats or licenses. Customers pay when identity verification succeeds and continue paying as verified credentials are reused for logins and attribute checks. In 2024, the platform added more than 20 million new wallets and supported hundreds of millions of authenticated logins, highlighting the compounding effect of credential reuse on monetization.

Revenue is spread across federal agencies, state governments, healthcare organizations, and commercial brands. ID.me reports usage by 20 federal agencies, 45 states, roughly 70 healthcare organizations, and more than 600 private-sector brands. This mix reduces reliance on any single vertical while reinforcing the wallet’s value as a cross-sector credential.

ID.me raised $340 million in a Series E round in September 2025, combining both equity and credit facilities. The round was led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from Ares Management, Moonshots Capital, Positive Sum, and Viking Global Investors.

Earlier in 2025, the company secured a $275 million credit facility from Ares Management in January. The company previously raised a $132 million Series D in April 2023, building on a $100 million Series C in March 2021 that valued the company at $1.5 billion.

Notable investors across rounds include CapitalG (Google's growth fund), Morgan Stanley Counterpoint, FTV Capital, and PSP Growth. ID.me has raised approximately $500 million in total funding across equity and debt facilities since its founding.

ID.me’s product is best understood as “Sign in with Google” for high-stakes identity, except the credential is designed to satisfy government-grade assurance levels, not just consumer convenience.

The front door is the reusable wallet. A user completes one high-assurance verification (document + selfie/liveness + checks), and then can reuse that credential anywhere ID.me is accepted, across government portals and private-sector sites. ID.me positions the wallet as broadly adopted, citing 152+ million users and coverage across 20 federal agencies, 45 states, 70 healthcare organizations, and 600+ brands.

The critical “moat-shaped” part of the flow is that ID.me is built for edge cases. When automation fails—bad lighting, no smartphone, atypical docs, higher-risk sessions—ID.me can route users into video chat, scheduled appointments, or even in-person verification. That operational surface area is expensive, but it’s also what lets ID.me win workflows where exclusion rates are politically, legally, or reputationally unacceptable.

Once verified, ID.me turns identity into modular “attribute cards” (e.g., age, student, nurse, veteran). That’s what makes the wallet valuable to commerce: merchants aren’t buying identity proofing for its own sake; they’re buying a verified attribute they can use to gate access, apply discounts, or reduce fraud.

ID.me uses a B2B2C model in which government agencies, healthcare organizations, and commercial brands pay for identity verification services for end consumers. Revenue comes from per-verification fees and subscription plans, not consumer charges.

Government customers typically pay per successful verification under multi-year contracts, with pricing aligned to NIST 800-63-3 IAL2/AAL2 compliance requirements. Healthcare organizations pay for patient identity verification and attribute sharing for secure access to medical records and insurance data.

Commercial customers use tiered subscription plans or pay-per-verification pricing. E-commerce merchants verify customer attributes such as age, military status, or student enrollment to apply targeted discounts and reduce fraud. Revenue accrues from the initial verification and from ongoing attribute sharing as users access different services.

In other words, government agencies and large institutions pay ID.me to verify end-users, and that spend effectively “acquires” verified wallets at national scale. Then commercial brands pay to accept those wallets for attribute verification and fraud reduction. Every new relying party increases the wallet’s usefulness to users, and every new verified user increases conversion rates for relying parties, so the network effects are real, even if the buyer differs by segment.

Operationally, ID.me is not pure software. Its cost base includes cloud compute, fraud tooling, and—most importantly—human review capacity that scales with adversarial pressure (fraud attempts, deepfakes, synthetic IDs), not just customer growth. This makes ID.me feel less like a 90% gross margin SaaS product and more like a “high-trust utility” where reliability and inclusion are part of the product.

ID.me competes across three overlapping identity markets that differ sharply in buying behavior, margin structure, and tolerance for failure: government-grade digital identity, enterprise/API identity verification, and platform-native identity ecosystems. What distinguishes ID.me across all three is its focus on high-assurance, reusable identity, even when that requires higher costs, human intervention, and slower automation than competitors optimized for pure throughput.

Where many rivals sell identity as a transactional API call, ID.me positions identity as long-lived infrastructure: once a user is verified, that credential can be reused across agencies and brands. This creates defensibility through network effects, but it also exposes ID.me to competition from players that already control consumer identity at the OS, browser, or cloud layer.

In government and regulated workflows, ID.me’s primary competitors are vertically integrated identity and security vendors that bundle identity verification with broader credentialing, PKI, or access management contracts.

Entrust, following its acquisition of Onfido, is the most direct challenger in this segment. Entrust combines document verification, biometric checks, and fraud detection with deep roots in certificates, smart cards, and government procurement. For agencies already standardized on Entrust’s credentialing infrastructure, adding Onfido-style identity proofing can be a procurement-efficient alternative to renewing ID.me contracts. The trade-off is that Entrust’s model is less consumer-centric and lacks the same cross-agency wallet reuse that ID.me emphasizes.

CLEAR represents a different kind of threat. Built on a paid consumer subscription model and airport biometric infrastructure, CLEAR leverages a massive proprietary dataset of face templates and liveness signals collected in high-security physical environments. While CLEAR’s core revenue comes from travelers, the company increasingly positions its biometric stack for workforce authentication and enterprise access. CLEAR’s advantage is enrollment quality and consumer familiarity; its weakness is that it remains optimized for physical access and premium demographics, rather than universal digital inclusion.

The key dynamic in this segment is inclusion versus automation. ID.me’s human fallback systems (video referees and in-person verification) allow it to serve populations that would fail fully automated checks. That capability is often decisive in public-sector procurement, but it also creates higher operating costs and makes ID.me vulnerable to budget pressure if agencies prioritize lowest-cost vendors over lowest-exclusion outcomes.

In the enterprise and fintech market, ID.me competes with API-first identity platforms optimized for speed, configurability, and developer adoption rather than reusability.

Socure is the scale leader here. Processing billions of identity checks annually, Socure emphasizes real-time risk scoring, consortium-based fraud detection, and approval-rate optimization, particularly for thin-file users in financial services. Its strength is automation at scale and sub-second decisioning; its weakness is that identity is ephemeral. Each verification stands alone, with limited consumer-facing reuse.

Persona occupies a similar lane but differentiates through flexibility and developer experience. Persona’s modular verification flows appeal to fintechs, marketplaces, and crypto platforms that want to tailor identity checks by geography, risk tier, or user segment. Like Socure, Persona is optimized for transactional KYC rather than persistent identity, which limits network effects but enables faster iteration and cleaner unit economics.

These API providers compete with ID.me primarily when customers view identity verification as a cost center rather than a shared credential layer. When conversion speed and customization matter more than reuse, API-first vendors tend to win. ID.me’s advantage reasserts itself when customers want verified attributes to persist across multiple services or when regulatory scrutiny favors higher-assurance identity over probabilistic risk scores.

The most existential competitive pressure comes from platform-native identity providers: Apple, Google, Microsoft, and large cloud ecosystems that already control consumer authentication, devices, and developer distribution.

Apple Wallet and Google Wallet are steadily expanding into digital identity, starting with mobile driver’s licenses and verifiable credentials anchored at the OS level. These platforms benefit from hardware-backed security, biometric sensors, and default distribution across billions of devices. If governments and enterprises broadly accept platform-native credentials for regulated access, third-party identity providers risk being relegated to edge cases and backup flows.

Similarly, cloud identity platforms like Microsoft Entra and AWS IAM increasingly bundle identity verification, access control, and compliance into broader enterprise contracts. While these services lack consumer-facing wallets today, their integration into enterprise IT budgets creates strong gravitational pull during digital transformation initiatives.

ID.me’s defense against platform displacement rests on neutrality and reach. It is not tied to a single device ecosystem, cloud vendor, or operating system, and it already operates as a shared identity layer across competitors that would not otherwise interoperate. The strategic question is whether regulators and institutions continue to value that neutrality, or whether convenience and platform consolidation override it.

ID.me’s core insight is that once a high-assurance identity exists, the marginal cost of reusing it across new workflows is far lower than re-verifying from scratch. That makes the company’s long-term opportunity less about the size of the identity verification market today and more about how many regulated interactions can be routed through a reusable digital credential over time.

Age verification is emerging as one of the most immediate and legislatively driven expansion vectors. New laws governing alcohol sales, online content access, gaming, and social media increasingly require electronic age checks rather than self-attestation. These requirements mirror the same primitives ID.me already operates (document verification, liveness detection, and reusable attributes) making age a natural “card” in the wallet.

Unlike generic KYC, age verification benefits disproportionately from reuse. Once a user has a verified age attribute, merchants can rely on it repeatedly without re-scanning IDs, reducing friction and liability. As more states and countries adopt digital age-gating laws, ID.me can position itself as compliance infrastructure rather than a one-off verification vendor.

Healthcare represents a structurally large and under-digitized identity market. Patient access, prior authorization, and interoperability workflows are increasingly mandated by regulators, but identity remains a bottleneck, especially for patients without stable credit or digital histories.

By extending its wallet into healthcare attributes such as coverage status, provider access, and record-sharing permissions, ID.me can move up the value chain from “login” to “identity-mediated data exchange.” Partnerships like Flexpa signal this direction, positioning ID.me as an enabler of patient-controlled data flows rather than just an authentication step.

If successful, this expansion ties ID.me into recurring, high-value transactions across insurers, providers, pharmacies, and digital health platforms, dramatically increasing revenue per verified user while reinforcing the importance of a reusable credential.

Enterprise HR and benefits administration is another adjacency where high-assurance identity matters but is poorly served by passwords and knowledge-based authentication. Payroll changes, benefits enrollment, and retirement account access are all high-fraud, high-liability workflows that increasingly demand stronger identity proofing.

ID.me’s installed base of government-verified identities gives it a unique angle: many employees already hold credentials that meet assurance standards higher than typical enterprise SSO. Offering employers a way to leverage those existing credentials for workforce access could reduce helpdesk costs and fraud while deepening ID.me’s presence beyond consumer-facing use cases.

Financial services KYC remains a massive market, but one where ID.me’s differentiation is narrow and specific. Its advantage lies in serving populations that traditional credit bureau-based identity systems underserve: immigrants, younger users, and low-credit individuals.

Video verification and document-based identity allow higher approval rates in these segments, making ID.me attractive to challenger banks, remittance providers, and government-backed financial programs. While ID.me is unlikely to replace API-first KYC vendors at scale in banking, it can carve out a defensible niche where inclusion and regulatory defensibility matter more than raw automation.

The longest-term TAM expansion is conceptual rather than categorical. If digital identity becomes a shared public utility, used to access services, prove eligibility, and authorize data sharing, then the value accrues to whoever operates the trust layer beneath it.

ID.me’s bet is that governments, healthcare systems, and regulated industries will continue to require neutral, high-assurance intermediaries rather than fully outsourcing identity to consumer platforms. If that holds, ID.me’s wallet becomes less a product and more a piece of national digital infrastructure, one that compounds in value as more institutions rely on it and more attributes are added over time.

Government concentration: ID.me's growth has been heavily dependent on government contracts, especially for unemployment benefits and federal agency access during the pandemic. Changes in government procurement policies, budget constraints, or political pressure around privacy could materially impact revenue from this customer segment.

Privacy backlash: The company has faced criticism over its facial recognition requirements and data collection practices, particularly when used for government benefit access. Increased regulatory scrutiny of biometric data usage or consumer privacy legislation could increase compliance costs or constrain expansion.

Platform competition: Apple, Google, and other major technology platforms are building native identity verification capabilities that could bypass third-party providers. If mobile driver's licenses and platform-native digital credentials gain widespread adoption, ID.me's role as an identity intermediary could be materially diminished.