ID.me Hit $150M ARR and a $2B+ Valuation: Blake Hall's Story From Army Ranger to Identity Wallet CEO

TL;DR: ID.me is a digital identity wallet that lets people prove who they are once and reuse that verified identity with retailers, government agencies and healthcare organizations. It was founded in 2010 by Blake Hall, a former Army Ranger and Harvard Business School graduate who turned down a McKinsey offer to build it. As Hall shared on the show, ID.me had 130 million users, over $150 million in ARR, growth of over 30% year over year and gross margins heading toward 80% at the time of the interview. In September 2025 the company announced a $340 million raise (a Series E plus a credit facility) at a valuation above $2 billion. The road there was ugly: Hall slept on a friend's couch, sold his dream car to make rent, and had to abandon his first two business ideas before the wallet idea clicked. He told the full story on The Product Market Fit Show.

The episode aired in 2024 (Season 3), so Hall's numbers are as of then. Later figures are labeled with date and source.

What does ID.me do?

ID.me sells identity verification and login. A person verifies who they are one time, including whether they belong to a group such as the military, students, first responders or teachers. After that they can click "ID.me" at checkout or on a government website and release only the information the other side needs.

Hall's own analogy on the show was payments. PayPal and Venmo made payment details portable. ID.me aims to make proof of identity portable.

"The whole country kind of wanted to wrap their arms around the military, whether it was retailers or nonprofit government programs. And obviously, military families wanted to access those programs, but they weren't available online because nobody could verify that that community was or members of that community were actually part of it." — Blake Hall, ID.me

Verification is hard because the source of truth is scattered. As Hall explained, military service data sits with the Department of Defense, the VA, the National Archives and USAA. The National Guard is run at the state level. Records are digitized only back to roughly 1980, so Vietnam-era veterans often have paper files only. A wallet only works if it can connect to the source that issued each credential.

Customers pay ID.me because verification replaces expensive manual steps. Hall called the model "workflow based return on investment": brands would otherwise verify people through call centers or in person, which costs more and feels worse. As he shared on the show, customers include Apple, BMW, Fanatics, Ford, GM, Cedar Fair and Under Armour, and users can move across 16 federal agencies and 40 state agencies that offer single sign-on (his numbers, as of 2024).

Key stat: as Hall shared on the show, ID.me had 130 million users and, in his words, had signed up half of America.

Who founded ID.me?

ID.me was founded in 2010 by Blake Hall, who is the CEO. Public sources describe the company as starting life as TroopSwap, a military deals site, before becoming Troop ID and then ID.me around 2013 (as of an October 2026 web search of Wikipedia and Technical.ly). Those sources also name Matt Thompson as a co-founder who left in 2015. On the show Hall mentioned a co-founder named Tanel who was based in Estonia in early 2011, so accounts of the founding team differ by source.

Hall's background is not a typical software founder's. As he shared, he spent 15 months in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 as an Army Ranger, leading scouts, snipers and a recon platoon. He led over 450 combat patrols and carried responsibility for 32 men. After that he went to Harvard Business School and spent a summer at McKinsey. He had an economics and American history background and, in his words, was not technical.

When it came to the decision to start the company, the contrast was sharp. As he shared, he had declined roughly a quarter of a million dollars a year at McKinsey and was paying himself $48,000.

"I was technically homeless at the time. I was sleeping on my rugby buddies couch." — Blake Hall, ID.me

His early lack of technical depth showed up in fundraising. A VC asked whether ID.me used OAuth or SAML, and Hall did not know the difference. He went home and studied OAuth, SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect until he could explain the market to CIOs and CTOs, which he now does.

How much has ID.me raised?

Only figures from the episode and from published reports are listed. Sources are noted, and all web figures are as of October 2026.

• Pre-seed and first close, 2010 to 2011 (episode): Hall shared that an HBS classmate wrote an $80,000 check, David Tisch of Techstars wrote $20,000, and his older brother wrote $20,000. The first close was $525,000, and it included $75,000 from a stranger he met on a flight, Larry Cochran. By late 2011 Hall said the company had raised about $2.5 million after McCombs Partners and others joined.
• Series B, 2017 (web): reported as $19 million led by FTV Capital (as summarized from published reports in an October 2026 search; treat as approximate).
• Series C, March 2021 (web): $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Viking Global Investors, with CapitalG, Morgan Stanley, Lead Edge Capital and WndrCo participating (Technical.ly, Global Venturing and Coverager, March 2021).
• Series E, September 2025 (web): ID.me announced $340 million at a valuation above $2 billion, led by Ribbit Capital with Ares, Moonshots Capital and Positive Sum. Reuters described it as a round combined with a credit facility. Axios and Sacra break it down as about $65 million of Series E equity plus a $275 million credit facility. Finovate reported the announcement brought total raised to about $1.1 billion.

Key stat: the 2025 headline of $340 million combines equity and debt. Only about $65 million of it was new equity, according to Axios and Sacra (September 2025).

I found no reported funding round, acquisition or IPO filing for ID.me after the September 2025 announcement (October 2026 search). I also could not verify a round called "Series D," so it is not listed here.

How ID.me found product market fit: from Craigslist to daily deals to an identity wallet

Hall's first idea was not identity at all. He saw that military families move about twice as often as the typical American family, so he planned a more trusted Craigslist for them and a wedge into students and then everyone else.

"The paradox here is that in order to win big, you have to focus small." — Blake Hall, ID.me

That version stalled. He needed USAA and Military.com to distribute it, and an executive told him that "fast for us is 18 months." That was the low point: December 2010 and January 2011, on a friend's couch.

In February 2011 Hall moved to Washington, DC, in a blizzard, hauling a U-Haul behind his pickup. With about $12,000 total between personal and business accounts, he signed a lease on a townhome he could not afford. As he shared, he sold his Corvette to cover the payments. Then USAA's Tom Ferris agreed to help with military verification, and the flight meeting with Larry Cochran closed the first round.

The second idea was daily deals, a Groupon-style model. As Hall shared, he built an MVP, got to about 50,000 to 60,000 users, and then read the cohort data. The churn did not support a sustainable business. Merchants told him the user count was too small for them, but they liked the real-time identity check at the front door.

The turn came after a talk with the founder of Bonobos and a comment from a Warby Parker founder, who asked how much he had raised and then told him not to mess it up. Hall rode the train home and decided the daily-deals business had to go.

"And so the next Monday, when everyone came in, I said, listen, everything that we've been doing, it's wrong. We're not gonna do it anymore." — Blake Hall, ID.me

At the time the team was about 15 people. The new plan, as he described it, was a verified identity wallet that brands could plug into their own flows, with the military as the wedge. The key insight was what brands actually wanted.

"What they want is a digital wallet that they can embed into their flows." — Blake Hall, ID.me

Building it took from late 2011 to November 2012. The first big launch was Under Armour, which Hall persuaded to integrate ID.me directly into its checkout, below the promo code box. He was so nervous the night before that he felt physically sick.

"Failure. If that launch had failed, it would have been over." — Blake Hall, ID.me

Key stat: as he shared on the show, about 48,000 users signed up in the first 45 days after the Under Armour launch, which he called product market fit.

The early metrics validated the model. Hall said 70% of users were new to the brand's file and average order value rose, for example from about 100 to 115 or 120 even with the discount. Brands then asked for more groups, including students and first responders.

"And so what a lot of our brand partners told us, and I had no idea that this would be true until we actually ran the experiment, they're like, we did this for corporate values, but this is one of the most profitable programs we've ever run." — Blake Hall, ID.me

Why did growth stall before it took off?

Revenue reached "low single digit millions" in 2013 and 2014, as Hall shared, followed by "a little bit of a stalling out period" while ID.me worked on the public sector. He deliberately tracked users, not revenue, as his North Star, because ID.me is a network. He even wanted early customers to pay less, since they were adding users and utility.

The user base doubled over and over: from 1 to 2 million, then 2 to 4, 4 to 8, 8 to 16 and 16 to 32 million. During the pandemic, in 2021, Hall said ID.me signed up over 40 million Americans. By 2024 he put ARR at over $150 million.

Key lessons from Blake's playbook

1. Pick a narrow wedge, then expand. The military community gave ID.me a trusted starting point with a clear verification problem. Brands, then governments, then other groups followed. 2. Treat fundraising as a series of experiments. Hall told early investors that he had assumptions and would run tests. If they held, he would scale. If not, he would change course. Several of them, he said, did not believe in the business model but believed in him.

"Once I read those books, I understood there was a scientific method to starting and building a company." — Blake Hall, ID.me

3. Listen to what customers ask for, even when it is not your product. Merchants rejected the app and the user count, but asked for verification they could embed. That comment became the company. 4. Kill your idea early when the cohort data says no. Hall saw churn in the daily-deals data and made the call, even though he had a team of 15 and the idea was fashionable. 5. Get a mentor who will lift you and deflate you. Hall's top advice to his younger self was to find someone smart in your space who cares about you. For him that was Kelly Purdue.

For related stories on pivots, enterprise sales and security, see what a startup pivot case study looks like, how to get your first enterprise customer, product-market fit for cybersecurity and product-market fit for fintech.

Listen to the full interview: He fought Al Qaeda in Iraq, turned down $250K at McKinsey, built a $150M ARR unicorn.

FAQ: ID.me

Q: What is ID.me? A: ID.me is a digital identity wallet that lets people verify who they are once and reuse that proof with retailers, government agencies and healthcare organizations. As CEO Blake Hall shared in a 2024 episode, it had 130 million users at the time.

Q: Who is the CEO of ID.me? A: Blake Hall is the founder and CEO. He is a former Army Ranger who served 15 months in Iraq, earned an MBA at Harvard Business School, and founded ID.me in 2010.

Q: How much funding has ID.me raised? A: ID.me announced $340 million in September 2025 at a valuation above $2 billion, combining a Series E of about $65 million with a $275 million credit facility (Axios, Sacra and Reuters). Finovate reported total raised of about $1.1 billion. In 2021 it raised a $100 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation.

Q: Who are ID.me's investors and customers? A: Reported investors include Ribbit Capital, Ares, Moonshots Capital, Positive Sum, Viking Global Investors, CapitalG and FTV Capital. As Hall shared on the show, customers include Apple, BMW, Fanatics, Ford, GM, Cedar Fair and Under Armour, plus federal and state agencies.

Q: How big is ID.me's revenue? A: As Hall shared on the show in 2024, ID.me had over $150 million in ARR, growth above 30% year over year and gross margins heading toward 80%. These figures are from the episode and are not independently confirmed.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

• Blake Hall, Founder and CEO of ID.me — an Army Ranger turned founder who pivoted from a daily-deals site to a verified identity wallet and scaled it to over $150M in ARR.

Listen to the full episode at pmf.show for the complete story.

Last updated: October 2026