Yoti comes of age as demand for digital ID grows

Take a look through the apps that a teenager or university student has on their mobile phone and, alongside well-known names such as TikTok and Snapchat, they might well have one called Yoti.

The app provides digital ID verification, an increasingly common way for people to prove their age — and other personal details — to anyone from websites and bars to government agencies around the world.

The market is growing quickly. Acceptance of digital forms of ID is widening, and governments are forcing social media companies to take age verification more seriously.

Yoti, ranked 52nd in the FT’s list of the UK’s fastest-growing companies, is riding the wave. Its revenues grew from £6.2mn in 2022 to over £32mn in 2025. Profitable at the ebitda level every month since March 2025, Yoti has UK government approval to process digital ID checks for Disclosure and Barring Service (used by employers to check criminal convictions and cautions) and the right to work.

A total of 23mn people have downloaded the Yoti app, with some using it as a digital ID and others for its facial age estimation feature which analyses a photograph to determine how old the user is likely to be. Yoti’s biggest market is the UK, but it also has a presence in Europe, the US and Asia.

Co-founder Robin Tombs says Yoti deletes the images used for facial age estimation immediately afterwards, but privacy campaigners are sceptical.

“We kill it immediately. We don’t store it. We’ll never be able to prove it [but] as long as we stick to our promises and do the right thing . . . we will be trusted more and more,” he says.

Building trust among consumers, companies and public authorities remains a challenge. When Spain’s Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) fined Yoti nearly €1mn in March 2026, the company disputed the decision.

In a blog post, Tombs rejected the AEPD’s claims that Yoti had violated EU rules on the handling of biometric data and immediately launched an appeal. “We felt we had to [hit back]. We were super frustrated . . . It has really hurt our business,” says Tombs. “We need to win.”

Nevertheless, last month, Yoti withdrew its Digital ID app from Apple and Android stores in Spain.

Tombs says that Yoti has strict rules on how it handles data. Customer data is off-limits internally, much to the chagrin of those who want the company to leverage that data as an income stream.

“We designed our product so that we could never get into it. Our CTO and our best people can’t get into it,” Tombs says.

“The marketers say: ‘Hang on, we need to know who people are otherwise we can’t market effectively.’ But part of our marketing message is that we don’t know who you are. You have to choose between the two, and we chose privacy.”

Another area of concern is accuracy: how can the algorithm distinguish between someone aged 17 years and six months and someone who has just turned 18?

“It’s an excellent solution — as long as it’s trustable,” says Stanislas Marchand, co-founder of wellness app Rocapine and a former games executive. “You can’t avoid the question of percentage accuracy . . . How many mistakes does it make? And how much are we — as a society — prepared to tolerate in return for a frictionless process?”

“People get hung up on it,” says Tombs, “but when you look at the regulations [they] say that you need to [make] reasonable efforts to make sure that person is over 18 . . . If you set the buffer with Yoti to 25, you won’t get anybody who is 18 getting through.”

Tombs would like to see more regulation when it comes to ‘liveness’, the process by which digital verification apps tell whether the face in front of them is real or, for example, somebody holding a photograph up to the camera.

Liveness can be checked by iBeta Quality Assurance — an independent company — and Yoti is one of the few companies to have passed iBeta Level 3. Ofcom has not said what level of liveness is required, says Tombs.

“Ofcom is very, very weak on [this],” he says. “There are companies using age-check suppliers who don’t have liveness or have really weak liveness.”

An Ofcom spokesperson said: “We’ve been clear that we expect services to use liveness detection, including for photo ID and facial age estimation, to minimise the risk of circumvention. We also expect all services to carry out thorough due diligence on any third-party solution . . . including checking for liveness. 

“Where we see evidence that age checks are not up to scratch, we’ve shown we won’t hesitate to act.”

Before they ran Yoti, Tombs and his co-founder, Noel Hayden, built Gamesys, an online casino which was eventually sold in 2021 to American gambling group Bally’s for £2bn.

“They were successful in their first endeavour and could self-finance . . . They didn’t have to rush after cash,” says Claire Trachet, an adviser and former investment banker.

But Trachet raises questions about Yoti’s future. “Do they plan to list? And, if so, where? The obvious answer would be the US,” she says.

When asked, Tombs suggests that for now, Yoti plans to remain a British company. “I’m a pretty proud Brit [and] Yoti is profitable . . . We don’t need to go to Silicon Valley to try and break even,” he says.

“There’s a question as to [whether we] want to try and be super successful in 20 countries compared to one or two. Can [we] do that without Silicon Valley-type capital? I’m not sure we know the answer to that.”