I can't imagine many people agreeing with you here.
You need to be (a) able to walk and drive, (b) in driving distance to a post office and (c) able to work around the post office's opening hours and (d) willing to waste the time to drive/line up etc.
Or you can spend less than a minute to upload a photo of your passport.
Which is great until someone impersonates you by spoofing a photo of you that satisfies “liveness” detection. It’s a lot harder to AI up an animated image in person at a post office.
id.me is valued at $1.8bn and has more than 130m users and has "partnerships with 15 federal agencies, 40 agencies in 30 states and over 600 retailers".
Bit of a stretch to call them a low cost outsourcer. They seem pretty legitimate.
They are a private business in search of a problem that is unnecessary for federal and state agencies to rely on for idp and identity proofing services.
Pretty hilarious to think that a $1.8bn business is "searching for a problem".
And given the frosty working relationship between federal and state agencies I am sympathetic to the idea that a private company would be able to deliver a better solution.
Last year: a liquidity event for early investors and employees, none of which helps the ongoing business but instead lets the founders and C-suite buy a private island / holiday home / mobile home / home:
Loans get issued based on profit generation (or asset value), so no, it is not “to keep them afloat”. You can’t get a loan if your company is not doing well or too risky (that’s why startups raise equity - because they are still too risky for someone to lend them money).
A loan is a form of debt, which is one of the two main forms of capital - the other main one being equity. Debt is less expensive than equity, so companies prefer to issue to raise capital via debt than equity.
Its not just profit that is considered for a loan. Anything related to states is more stable and thus less risky. Or how would you evaluate state bonds by profit only? Elon knows what i am talking about.
Login.gov is the default idp for the Social Security Administration, supports 200+ federal agencies for identity, and IRS was in the works to onboard Login.gov before this new admin fuckery occurred. They handle over 10 million monthly active users and 40 million monthly sign-ins across nearly 50 agencies and states. Will it still happen? Who knows. id.me will likely IPO based off the ~$130-$150M ARR they have, some folks will get wealthy, and it'll still end up the equivalent of confirming your discount eligibility at Home Depot for veterans.
