Turning Vision Into the Internet’s Trust Infrastructure

Prove is honored to be named to the 2026 Inc. 5000, which recognizes the country’s fastest-growing companies. Inclusion among the country’s fastest-growing private companies is noteworthy, but since my father repeatedly advised, “Don’t go be a big shot,” it’s important to point out that an achievement like this is only made possible by the trust of our customers and partners and the commitment of our employees. To them, we owe a deep debt of gratitude. They also make it a lot of fun to do what we do.

Being on this list is partly the result of so many important milestones that Prove has experienced over the past year, and it points to the rapid, continuous trajectory of work still underway. These milestones reinforce Prove’s role in leading the identity space forward and helping enterprises prepare for what comes next.

Digital Identity is undergoing a profound transition. For decades, the internet has relied on probabilistic judgments like signals, credentials, and behavioral data to assess whether someone is who they claim to be.

That model no longer works. AI can now manufacture many of the signals we once relied on to establish identity. Documents can be fabricated. Faces and voices can be synthesized. Personal information can be stolen or reconstructed. Sophisticated attacks can be launched and adapted at machine speed. Convincing evidence is incredibly easy to manufacture, and that requires enterprises to move beyond simply detecting what may be fake and proving what is real.

Over more than a decade, Prove has built a proprietary history of authenticated identity interactions spanning more than 10 billion devices and 2.5 billion verified identities across 227 countries and territories. By linking national IDs, phone-tenure history, and cryptographic authentication keys, Prove enables deterministic identity matching that moves beyond probabilistic heuristics, and extends that cryptographic trust to autonomous AI agents acting on behalf of verified people and businesses.

Put simply: history creates trust, and deterministic technology can turn that trust into proof.

Importantly, these are not separate Prove differentiators; they compound one another. This is not a foundation that can be replicated from a cold start, regardless of the capital invested. Technology can be copied, models can be trained, and data can be purchased—but more than a decade of legitimate identity relationships and authenticated interactions can only be built over time.

Growth that reflects the shift in identity

In April, we introduced the Prove Identity Platform to bring identity verification, adaptive authentication, fraud protection, key management, and proactive identity monitoring, together on a unified foundation. The idea behind the platform is straightforward: identity should not be treated as something established once at onboarding and then assumed to remain trusted. It should be persistently managed and continuously strengthened through each interaction, responsive to changes in risk, and capable of extending verified trust across the entire customer lifecycle.

Persistent identity management is an approach that establishes identity with confidence, continuously evaluates trust as risk changes, and carries verified identity across the customer lifecycle. For years, digital identity has largely been treated as a checkpoint. Users have been expected to open an account by uploading a document, answering a question, or entering a one-time passcode. Once that box has been checked, subsequent interactions depend on fragmented authentication, fraud and risk systems operating with limited shared context. That architecture creates friction for legitimate customers and opportunities for sophisticated attackers.    

We believe identity should instead be treated as a persistent relationship. It should be established with   confidence, connected to trusted devices and credentials strengthened through legitimate interactions, and available when trust needs to be established again. Every legitimate interaction can add context to that relationship, creating more identity history and potentially producing stronger relationships with better outcomes while preserving consent and trust. Partnerships with Velocity and Ownera verified identity into enterprise stablecoin payments, helping address the compliance and counterparty-risk requirements that stand between promising payment infrastructure and enterprise adoption.

At the same time, we convened an Executive Advisory Board with leaders from banking, payments, technology, and AI-native businesses to examine trust and accountability for AI agents. We also added experienced leadership in privacy-preserving biometrics, KYC, and platform strategy. These efforts reflect a conviction that the next identity model will not be shaped by new operating standards, clear accountability, privacy by design, and close collaboration across industries.

Growth with a purpose

The Inc. 5000 recognizes a period of strong business growth. We see that growth as validation of a broader market shift: enterprises are moving beyond identity point solutions and toward infrastructure that can support trust continuously.

That shift has direct implications for executive teams. When done effectively, a persistent identity approach reduces fraud losses, removes unnecessary friction, improves conversion, supports safer expansion into new markets, and creates the confidence to adopt new technologies. In an agentic economy, identity will increasingly determine which businesses can move quickly without losing control.

Our responsibility is to make that transition practical. Prove today is trusted by thousands of leading companies, including 19 of the top 20 U.S. banks. The scale of our network and the depth of our identity intelligence give us a strong foundation, but scale alone is not the goal. The goal is to help organizations replace repeated identity guesswork with persistent, privacy-aware trust.

We are grateful to our customers, partners, and employees whose work made this Inc. 5000 recognition possible. We will take a moment to appreciate it. Then we will keep building.