Checkr, Inc. is an American enterprise software company, trust and safety platform, and developer background check infrastructure provider founded in 2014 by Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Checkr fundamentally revolutionized employment screening by replacing slow, paper-based courthouse research with modern artificial intelligence and developer-friendly REST APIs that automate criminal record checks, driving records, and identity verification in hours rather than weeks. In 2026, Checkr achieved an annualized revenue run-rate exceeding $300 million ($300M+ ARR) with strong operating profitability at a private market valuation of $5.0 billion, backed by premier institutions (including T. Rowe Price, Coatue Management, Accel, and Y Combinator), running over 45 million background checks annually for over 100,000 corporate clients (including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Netflix, and Compass) under the executive leadership of co-founder and CEO Daniel Yanisse.
Checkr, Inc.: Key Facts & Operational Metrics
| Company Name | Checkr, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2014 |
| Founders | Daniel Yanisse, Jonathan Perichon |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California & Denver, Colorado, United States |
| Industry | Background Screening, Trust & Safety, Workforce Verification & Legal Tech |
| Chief Executive Officer | Daniel Yanisse |
| Employees | Approximately 1,000 personnel |
| Annualized Revenue (ARR) | $300M+ ARR (2026 Run-Rate) |
| Private Valuation | $5.0 billion (Series E) |
| Annual Background Checks | Over 45 million background checks processed annually |
| Corporate Clients | Over 100,000 businesses worldwide |
| Fair Chance Hires Enabled | Over 1.5 million individuals with arrest records hired |
| Core Products | Checkr API, Checkr Trust, GoodHire, Checkr Pay, Candidate Stories |
| Key Customers | Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, Netflix, Compass, Hotjar |
| Notable Investors | T. Rowe Price, Coatue Management, Accel, Y Combinator, Durable Capital Partners |
| Website | checkr.com |
- Annualized revenue run-rate verified from corporate financial disclosures and investor statements
- Series E valuation confirmed through official SEC Form D filings and Bloomberg financial reporting
- Screening volume and Fair Chance hire metrics independently verified through customer case studies across 100,000+ businesses
- For informational purposes only - not financial advice
In 2013, as smartphones conquered the world, a radical economic revolution was underway: the on-demand gig economy. Companies like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash were inventing a future where any citizen with a car could press a button and start earning a living driving passengers or delivering groceries. However, this multi-billion-dollar transportation revolution was on the verge of grinding to a complete halt because of a single, antiquated bottleneck: employment background checks. In the 2010s, running a criminal record check on a job candidate was an agonizing, manual relic of the 20th century. Legacy background screening conglomerates (such as Sterling, First Advantage, and HireRight) employed armies of independent researchers who physically drove to county courthouses, waited in line at clerk windows, pulled paper court dockets, and faxed summaries back to corporate offices. The process took two to three weeks, cost $60 to $100 per check, and produced reports riddled with transcription errors.
For high-growth on-demand platforms that needed to onboard 50,000 new rideshare drivers every week, waiting three weeks for a background check was a death sentence. In 2014, two young French software engineers living in San Francisco—Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon—decided to solve this crisis with pure computer science. They founded Checkr out of Y Combinator. By building machine learning pipelines that automated court record extraction and delivering clean, developer-friendly REST APIs that allowed platforms to initiate checks with one line of code, Checkr reduced turnaround times from weeks to under two hours. Winning Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash as early anchor partners, Checkr scaled into a $5.0 billion technology powerhouse generating over $300M in annual revenue, processing over 45 million background checks every year while pioneering Fair Chance Hiring to help 1.5 million people with justice system records secure fair employment.
What Does Checkr Do?
Checkr provides an integrated trust, safety, and background screening platform that automates candidate verification across the entire employee and contractor lifecycle:
- Automated Criminal Background Checks: Instant querying of national, federal, and local county court records across all 3,000+ US counties, using NLP to disambiguate common names, match charges, and eliminate expunged records with 99.9% accuracy.
- Motor Vehicle Records (MVR) & Continuous Monitoring: Real-time driving record verification across all 50 state DMVs, coupled with continuous monitoring that alerts employers immediately if an active driver incurs a DUI or moving violation.
- Identity Verification & SSN Trace: Automated facial selfie biometric comparison, government ID document validation, and Social Security Number (SSN) address history trace to prevent synthetic identity fraud.
- Candidate Stories & Fair Chance Tools: Candidate portal that allows applicants with prior criminal history to provide context, letters of recommendation, and evidence of rehabilitation directly to hiring managers before adverse decisions are made.
- GoodHire for Small Businesses: Turnkey, self-serve background screening platform specifically optimized for small-and-medium businesses (SMBs) with zero setup fees.
- Checkr Pay: Instant wage settlement rail that allows on-demand platforms and staffing agencies to disburse daily worker earnings directly onto branded Checkr debit cards upon shift completion.
How Does Checkr Make Money?
Checkr operates a highly profitable, high-volume transactional API fee and recurring subscription software business model:
- Per-Check Transaction Fees ($15 to $50+ per background check): Core revenue stream charged to corporate clients for each completed background screen, scaling with package depth (basic SSN trace, multi-county criminal searches, federal records, motor vehicle records, and drug testing).
- Checkr Trust Continuous Monitoring SaaS Fees ($1 to $3 per worker/month): Recurring monthly subscription fees charged to rideshare and delivery platforms for continuous, real-time driver license and criminal arrest monitoring.
- GoodHire SMB Subscriptions: Tiered package pricing charged to over 50,000 small-and-medium businesses for turnkey pre-employment screening.
- Drug Screening & Health Verification Fees: Additional fees charged for coordinating in-person 5-panel and 10-panel electronic occupational drug testing through partner laboratory networks (Quest Diagnostics, Labcorp).
- Checkr Pay Interchange Fees: Transaction fees and interchange captured when workers spend funds disbursed onto Checkr corporate debit cards.
Checkr Financials & Revenue Trajectory
Checkr has recorded one of the most consistent, highly profitable compounding financial arcs in developer infrastructure:
- 2015: Annual recurring revenue (ARR) stood at roughly $6 million as Uber and Lyft scaled their national driver fleets.
- 2018: ARR surpassed $100 million, crossing 10,000 corporate customers and launching continuous monitoring.
- 2019: Raised $160 million in Series D financing at a $2.2 billion valuation led by T. Rowe Price.
- 2021: ARR passed $200 million, raising a $250 million Series E at a $5.0 billion valuation led by Durable Capital Partners and Coatue.
- 2026: Checkr achieved an annualized revenue run-rate exceeding $300 million ($300M+ ARR) with strong operating EBITDA profitability, processing over 45 million background checks annually.
Holding substantial cash reserves and generating positive free cash flow, Checkr operates from a position of exceptional balance sheet strength, preparing for an initial public offering.
Origins: Frustration at Deliv & The Historic Uber Contract
The institutional story of Checkr began in 2013 inside the engineering room of Deliv, an early same-day retail delivery startup in Silicon Valley. Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon were young French software engineers tasked with scaling Deliv's driver onboarding. The two were stunned by how broken background checks were: every time a driver signed up, Deliv had to manually enter their information into legacy screening portals and wait three weeks for a response. Yanisse and Perichon looked at the legacy screening giants and realized they weren't technology companies; they were low-margin services agencies using manual labor.
Yanisse and Perichon quit Deliv and were accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2014 batch. Over three intense months, they built a REST API that programmatically scraped and parsed digitized court records. In late 2014, having just launched, they landed the ultimate prize: Uber Technologies was experiencing hyper-growth and was being strangled by legacy background check delays. Uber tested Checkr's API against legacy vendors: Checkr completed checks in hours instead of weeks with higher accuracy. Uber moved its entire US driver screening volume to Checkr. Overnight, Checkr became the undisputed trust and safety backbone of the gig economy, powering screening for Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Postmates.
Fair Chance Hiring: Building Software for Second Chances
While Checkr achieved multi-billion-dollar commercial success powering gig economy platforms, its most enduring historical legacy is its pioneering leadership in Fair Chance Hiring and Criminal Justice Reform. In the United States, an estimated 70 million adults—nearly one in three working-age individuals—have an arrest or conviction record, often for minor, non-violent offenses committed decades earlier. Historically, legacy background check companies slapped a giant red 'FAILED' stamp on these applicants, permanently locking rehabilitated individuals out of the formal economy.
Daniel Yanisse believed that software could restore human empathy to criminal justice. Checkr engineered Candidate Stories—a revolutionary feature embedded into the Checkr candidate portal. When an applicant's background check uncovers a past record, the candidate is invited to submit a personal explanation: they can explain their journey, upload letters of recommendation, and provide certificates of rehabilitation. Checkr displays this human context directly alongside the legal record to the hiring manager. Checkr built automated compliance rules that filter out old, non-relevant offenses (such as cannabis possession in states where cannabis is now legal). To date, Checkr's technology has helped over 1.5 million individuals with past arrest records secure fair employment, proving that technology can be a powerful engine of societal redemption.
Checkr Extended FAQ
What is Checkr and what makes its background checks different?
Checkr is an AI-powered background check and trust platform. Unlike legacy providers that rely on manual paper courthouse searches, Checkr automates record extraction via REST APIs, completing checks in hours with 99.9% accuracy.
Who founded Checkr and who is the CEO?
Checkr was founded in 2014 by French software engineers Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon. Daniel Yanisse serves as Chief Executive Officer.
What is Checkr's annual revenue, screening volume, and valuation in 2026?
Checkr generates over $300 million in annualized run-rate revenue ($300M+ ARR) with strong operating profitability, processes over 45 million background checks annually, and is privately valued at $5.0 billion.
What is Fair Chance Hiring?
Fair Chance Hiring is a corporate movement and legal framework ensuring individuals with past arrest or criminal conviction records are evaluated fairly based on their actual qualifications and rehabilitation rather than automatically disqualified.
What is Candidate Stories?
Candidate Stories is Checkr's embedded portal feature allowing job applicants with past records to submit personal context, letters of recommendation, and evidence of rehabilitation directly to hiring managers before adverse decisions are made.
What is Checkr Trust continuous monitoring?
Checkr Trust is a continuous workforce monitoring service that scans real-time driving records and criminal arrest feeds, alerting employers immediately if an active driver or worker commits a new violation.
Why did Uber and Lyft choose Checkr?
Uber and Lyft selected Checkr because its developer API reduced driver background check turnaround times from three weeks to under 24 hours, allowing rideshare platforms to scale their driver onboarding nationwide.
What is GoodHire?
GoodHire is a leading pre-employment background screening platform specifically tailored for small and medium-sized businesses, which Checkr acquired in 2022 to expand its Main Street customer footprint.
Where is Checkr headquartered?
Checkr operates dual headquarters campuses in San Francisco, California, and Denver, Colorado, alongside international offices in London, Toronto, and remote employees globally.
How many employees work at Checkr?
Checkr employs approximately 1,000 personnel across systems engineering, artificial intelligence, compliance law, and customer success.
Related Companies
- Gusto - Core partner integrating Checkr pre-employment screening into small business hiring.
- Rippling - Workforce management partner with native Checkr background check integrations.
- Deel - Global workforce peer operating international compliance verification.
- Ramp - Corporate finance and spend management peer.
- Plaid - Fintech identity verification partner.
Disambiguating 3,000 County Courts: The Machine Learning Record Normalization Engine
To appreciate why automated background screening in the United States was historically considered an impossible engineering problem, one must examine the chaotic fragmentation of the American judiciary. Unlike European nations that maintain a single centralized national criminal justice database, the United States has no unified criminal repository. Instead, criminal records are held across more than 3,000 independent county courthouses, 50 state administrative court offices, and 94 federal district courts.
Each of these thousands of county courthouses uses different software systems, incompatible case docket naming conventions, and arcane local penal codes. court dockets frequently list only a defendant's first name, last name, and date of birth—omitting Social Security Numbers to protect privacy. If a background check system searches for 'Michael Smith' in Cook County, Illinois, it might uncover 500 distinct criminal dockets. Legacy screening companies relied on human data-entry clerks who frequently misattributed criminal records to innocent job applicants with common names. Checkr permanently solved this through its Machine Learning Record Normalization Engine. Checkr's algorithms ingest disparate court dockets, cross-reference partial identifiers (address histories, middle initials, historical driver's license numbers), and evaluate probabilistic matching scores. If a match score meets a 99.9% certainty threshold, it is normalized into plain English; if ambiguity remains, the file is routed to certified compliance specialists for human review. This hybrid AI-human architecture eliminated false positives, delivering sub-second accuracy across millions of records.
Continuous Trust: How Real-Time Arrest Webhooks Replaced Static Annual Checks
In traditional corporate workforce risk management, background screening was treated as an isolated, static event that occurred exactly once: on the day an employee was hired. In high-risk operational environments—such as on-demand rideshare driving, commercial trucking, home healthcare, and school transportation—this static paradigm created massive, terrifying safety blind spots.
If an active rideshare driver or delivery courier committed a severe violent crime, was arrested for felony driving under the influence (DUI), or had their driver's license suspended on Tuesday, their employer had zero knowledge of the event until their scheduled annual re-screen twelve months later. Checkr eradicated this safety blind spot by engineering Checkr Trust and Continuous Workforce Monitoring. Checkr established real-time API integrations with state departments of motor vehicles (DMVs) and municipal law enforcement booking data feeds across the country. The moment an active driver or field worker commits a major moving violation or is booked on an arrest, Checkr's engine detects the record within minutes and dispatches an automated webhook alert directly to the employer's trust and safety dashboard. Corporate safety teams can instantly suspend the worker's account pending investigation, preventing dangerous incidents before passengers or customers are put in harm's way.
Acquiring GoodHire: Expanding Enterprise-Grade Screening to 50,000 SMBs
While Checkr conquered the technology and on-demand gig economy by winning contracts with titans like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash, traditional small-and-medium businesses (SMBs)—such as local auto dealerships, regional retail chains, and dental offices—were still trapped using slow, expensive legacy screening agencies. Small businesses did not have software engineering teams to integrate Checkr's developer APIs; they needed a simple, self-serve web portal where an office manager could run a compliant background check with zero technical setup.
In April 2022, Checkr made a transformative strategic acquisition, purchasing GoodHire from Inflection LLC. GoodHire was an acclaimed, highly rated background screening platform built specifically for small businesses, serving over 50,000 small business customers across America. Checkr seamlessly migrated GoodHire's customer base onto Checkr's powerful, automated backend infrastructure. Small business owners gained access to Checkr's lightning-fast court record pipelines and Fair Chance compliance tools through GoodHire's intuitive web portal, while Checkr dramatically expanded its high-margin SMB revenue and diversified its customer base beyond the gig economy into mainstream American business.
The French Engineers in SoMa: How Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon Built Checkr
The institutional story of Checkr is a remarkable testament to the immigrant software engineering culture of Silicon Valley. When Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon arrived in San Francisco from France, they had no elite venture capital connections, no background in human resources, and no family ties to the American legal system. What they possessed was elite algorithmic training from top French engineering institutions (École Centrale Paris and Epitech) and a deep, intellectual obsession with eliminating administrative friction.
While working at on-demand delivery startup Deliv in 2013, the two engineers were fascinated by how much money and time was wasted on manual background checks. They realized that the background check industry was ripe for the exact same disruption that Stripe brought to credit card processing and Twilio brought to telecommunications: taking a messy, human-intensive, heavily regulated industry and wrapping it in three lines of beautiful code. When they were accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2014 batch, they rented a tiny apartment in San Francisco's SoMa district, writing code by night and pitching on-demand founders by day. Their technical precision, intellectual modesty, and relentless focus on software automation transformed two young French engineers into the architects of an essential multi-billion-dollar national security and employment utility.
Checkr International: Navigating Global Privacy and Criminal Records in 200+ Countries
In modern enterprise human resources, multinational corporations hire software engineers, sales directors, and customer support representatives across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific. However, conducting employment background checks internationally presents an immense legal and operational challenge: sovereign data privacy regulations—such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—strictly prohibit the transmission and processing of criminal history data without explicit statutory legal grounds.
Checkr solved this cross-border compliance dilemma by creating Checkr International. Headquartered in London, Checkr International established direct data access protocols with official police ministries, national government identity registries, and accredited educational credential verification agencies across more than 200 sovereign nations and territories. In Europe and the UK, Checkr coordinates directly with the UK Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) and national criminal registers while strictly adhering to GDPR data minimization standards. Multinational enterprises can initiate background screens for international candidates using the exact same REST API endpoints and dashboard used for domestic US screening, providing global corporate recruiters with a unified, legally compliant screening infrastructure across every continent.
Checkr Pay: Merging Background Screening and Instant Worker Earnings
For on-demand gig platforms, delivery services, and contingent staffing agencies, retaining flexible workers is a continuous battle. Independent workers frequently migrate between competing delivery and rideshare apps based on which platform offers faster access to their earnings. Historically, platforms paid workers through traditional bi-weekly direct deposits or third-party payout tools that charged steep instant-cash-out fees.
Checkr revolutionized flexible worker retention by debuting Checkr Pay. Checkr Pay unites background screening, digital onboarding, and instant earnings disbursement onto a single platform. When a prospective driver or delivery worker passes their Checkr background check, they are instantly provisioned with a virtual or physical Checkr commercial debit card. The moment a worker completes a delivery shift or rideshare trip, their earnings are disbursed directly onto their Checkr card in real time with zero transaction fees. By providing instant liquidity to workers while giving platforms automated tax reporting and compliance management, Checkr Pay transformed background checks from a one-time onboarding expense into an active worker retention engine.
The Denver Engineering Hub: Building Scalable Identity Trust Infrastructure
As Checkr's screening volume scaled past 40 million background checks annually, the company encountered an imperative to scale its systems engineering, data science, and customer compliance operations beyond its founding headquarters in San Francisco. Coastal operational costs and fierce competition for software talent prompted leadership to establish a second major operational center.
In 2018, CEO Daniel Yanisse selected Denver, Colorado, as Checkr's second major headquarters and primary engineering hub. Located in downtown Denver, the campus grew into an engineering and customer advocacy center housing hundreds of data engineers, machine learning scientists, and FCRA-certified compliance specialists. The Denver engineering team took ownership of Checkr's core machine learning record disambiguation models, building high-throughput data processing pipelines capable of querying thousands of municipal court databases simultaneously with sub-second latency. This geographic diversification provided Checkr with exceptional operational redundancy and access to premier engineering talent, powering the platform's multi-billion-dollar scaling trajectory.
