Checkr, Inc.
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Checkr, Inc.
Compare market positioning with top industry peers
Explore Checkr
Core profile pages, annual revenue records, and related research hubs for this company.
Company History
Founded 2014 in San Francisco, California, United States
Checkr was founded in 2014 by French software engineers Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon. While working as engineers at startups in San Francisco, they witnessed the rapid rise of on-demand platforms like Uber, Lyft, and Handy. These platforms needed to hire thousands of independent contractors every week, but the background check industry was stuck in the analog era. Legacy background check providers relied on paper forms, manual fax transmissions, and human runners walking into physical county courthouses, taking two to three weeks to verify a single driver. Yanisse and Perichon realized that criminal records and motor vehicle records could be programmatically queried, parsed, and standardized using modern APIs and machine learning. Entering Y Combinator's Summer 2014 batch, they built the first developer-friendly background check API. Within months, Checkr signed Uber, Lyft, and Instacart, slashing onboarding wait times from weeks to minutes. As Checkr grew, the founders recognized a deeper societal mission: millions of qualified Americans with minor, non-violent criminal records were being systematically shut out of employment by inaccurate, biased background checks. Checkr committed to Fair Chance Hiring, building automated software filters to help individuals with past convictions find employment and scaling into a $5.0 billion market leader. In 2013, inside an on-demand startup in Silicon Valley, two young French software engineers—Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon—stumbled upon an absurd reality: onboarding delivery couriers took three weeks because legacy background check companies had human runners physically driving to county courthouses to look at paper court files. The engineers looked at each other and realized that background screening was stuck in the 1980s. They entered Y Combinator in 2014, rented an apartment in San Francisco's SoMa district, and spent eighteen months coding an automated REST API that connected directly to electronic court databases. When Uber tested the API and saw turnaround times collapse from three weeks to two hours, Uber signed on as an anchor partner. That developer-first breakthrough built Checkr into a $5.0 billion trust utility that processes over 45 million checks every year.
Daniel Yanisse is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Checkr, Inc. While working at Deliv in 2013, Yanisse was shocked to discover that onboarding a delivery driver took weeks because legacy background check companies relied on manual paper courthouse searches. In 2014, alongside Jonathan Perichon, Yanisse founded Checkr in San Francisco to automate background screening via modern APIs. Under Yanisse's visionary, mission-driven leadership, Checkr grew into a $5.0 billion technology titan generating over $300 million in annual revenue, powering screening for Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash. Yanisse emerged as a national champion of Fair Chance Hiring, helping over 1.5 million individuals with prior arrest records secure employment. Yanisse's principled, mission-driven leadership made him one of the most respected enterprise software founders in Silicon Valley. Pairing ruthless technical execution with a profound commitment to criminal justice reform, Yanisse steered Checkr from a two-person YC startup into a $5.0 billion technology powerhouse past $300M ARR, championing Fair Chance Hiring to unlock life-changing economic mobility for over 1.5 million individuals with past arrest records.
Jonathan Perichon is the co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer of Checkr. A gifted computational programmer, Perichon architected Checkr's original developer API and automated record-scraping engine. At Checkr, Perichon built the scalable backend data pipelines that connect to thousands of municipal court databases with sub-second response times, engineered the security infrastructure that safeguards millions of sensitive identity records, and guided the early technical scaling of the platform before transitioning to independent technology investments. At Checkr, Perichon's computational programming mastery was the foundational engine that automated the American background check industry. Personally architecting the core REST API and machine learning record normalization pipelines that query over 3,000 county courthouses, Perichon built high-availability data architectures that process millions of identity verification requests with sub-second execution speeds and flawless data integrity.
Daniel Yanisse and Jonathan Perichon founded Checkr and graduated Y Combinator with an API for background checks.
Secured milestone screening partnerships with Uber, Lyft, and Instacart, powering the gig economy.
Raised $160 million led by T. Rowe Price, expanding into enterprise Fortune 500 corporate hiring.
Closed funding round led by T. Rowe Price, Coatue, and Accel, reaching a $5.0B private valuation.
Acquired SMB screening leader GoodHire ($300M+) and Canadian background check provider ModoHR.
Surpassed $300M ARR, processing over 40 million background checks annually for 100,000+ customers.
Acquired the leading small and mid-sized business pre-employment screening provider from Inflection.
Acquired the leading Canadian background check and workforce verification software company.
Since its establishment in 2014, Checkr, Inc. expanded from an early-stage venture into a recognized leader in AI Background Checks, Identity Verification, Workforce Compliance & Human Resources Tech, overcoming key market challenges.
Over its history, Checkr, Inc. executed decisive strategic pivots toward scalable monetization and digital distribution, securing its current market leadership.
By continually modernizing operations and embracing workflow automation, Checkr, Inc. maintains resilience through changing technological and economic cycles.