Verified

Farhan Afsahi started his first company at 18—a hybrid of Zoom and Moodle called EdPecs. That venture taught him valuable lessons about design and software development, but it wasn't until he built a web hosting startup called X Grid that he truly began to understand enterprise problems. After spending 10 months working on these projects, Farhan noticed a critical gap in the B2B verification space. While companies like ZoomInfo, Bombora, and Cognizant were selling company data for sales purposes, nobody was building specifically for fraud detection and verification in B2B transactions. The problem became visceral when Farhan studied cases of international trade fraud—particularly how scammers impersonate legitimate companies during cross-border deals, a problem made worse by geopolitical tensions like the Russia-Ukraine war.

Verified launched as an API-first platform in 2022, positioned as "Stripe for verification." Farhan's core insight was that existing data vendors had blind spots: they weren't connected to government data sources, they focused on e-commerce fraud (not B2B), and they couldn't provide real-time verification for companies registered yesterday. By aggregating over 300 data sources and focusing on red flags—sanctions lists, money laundering registries, impersonation indicators—Farhan built a product that could answer a simple question: "Is this company legitimate?"

The technical approach was deliberately narrow. Rather than building a sales intelligence tool, Verified targeted enterprises and fintechs that faced regulatory requirements (KYC, AML compliance) and needed due diligence on vendors and counterparties. This regulatory moat became Farhan's differentiator, particularly for buyers in high-risk regions like China, Russia, and the Middle East—areas his competitors didn't touch.

Farhan's first customer arrived about one month after he started building, roughly nine months before the interview. It was a referral through his father's network in the logistics industry—a connection that proved Farhan didn't need fraud expertise to spot the market gap. By the interview date, Verified had 27 paying customers out of 380 total users, each paying between $24–50 per month on average. The annual run rate was $7,800 ($650 MRR).

What's striking is that enterprises were already knocking on the door. RealSpargo, Maybank, Cheddar Cash, Corner Shop (Uber's subsidiary), and Shopify all visited the website and scheduled demos—a signal of strong product-market interest despite minimal revenue. This suggested Verified wasn't a demand problem; it was a go-to-market and credibility problem.

What worked: focusing ruthlessly on B2B fraud rather than competing on general company data. What worked: building APIs that developers and enterprises could integrate into their own workflows. What worked: accumulating data from regions competitors ignored.

What held them back: bootstrapping meant no credibility with enterprise buyers. Farhan was explicit about this: "We have to raise. But not for like having money reasons. Because right now we're working with like government offices... if we have a good like backers, investors that will add credibility to our name." A 22-year-old solo founder with no fraud background couldn't land the enterprise contracts that were clearly available. Investors and corporate development teams needed to see validation.

Farhan was targeting a pre-seed round of $200K–$500K at a $3 million post-money valuation, which would sell roughly 10% of the company. He rejected a hypothetical $500K at $2M post-money ($2.5M fully diluted) as undervaluing the business, insisting he'd only take $300K for 10%. His argument: growth trajectory, proprietary data quality, and the scale of the opportunity in B2B compliance. The team of two was working toward launching public APIs to serve SMBs and developers, with the long-term lens on enterprise deployment. By bootstrapping to 27 customers in 10 months, Farhan had proven traction; now he needed a brand and a network to unlock the much larger TAM.