SpringVerify has not taken a single rupee of institutional funding since May 2018, and its own public disclosures do not show an equity round since. Yet by the financial year ending March 2025 the company was running employee background checks for more than 3,500 organisations across India and the United States, filing revenue in the ₹10-50 crore ($1 million-$5.2 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) band with a private company data aggregator, and growing net profit year on year.
That is the tidy part of the story. The messier part is that SpringVerify did not start as a background-check company at all. It began as a crowdsourced recruiting marketplace, mutated into a blockchain protocol that sold its own cryptocurrency token to fund a “verified LinkedIn,” and only became the business it is today after both of those ideas were quietly abandoned. This is a profile of how a founder spent roughly four years chasing two different hype cycles before the boring, overlooked back-office process next to his real product turned out to be the actual company.
Quick facts
| Company | SpringVerify, a product of Springworks (legal entity: Springrole India Private Limited) |
| Founded | 2014, as SpringRole in Santa Monica; renamed Springworks on 9 September 2019; the Indian operating entity was incorporated on 3 July 2017 |
| Founder | Kartik Mandaville, Founder and CEO |
| Businesses | SpringVerify (background verification, flagship), EngageWith, SpringRecruit, Goodfit, Trivia |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹10-50 crore for FY25 (year to March 2025), up about 16.8-17% year on year, per Tofler’s analysis of Registrar of Companies filings |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net profit, up roughly 8.0% year on year in FY25 (Tofler) |
| Listed | Private; no IPO filed |
| Market value / last valuation | Not publicly disclosed; no institutional funding round is on record since May 2018 (Tracxn, Crunchbase) |
| Key shareholder / CEO | Kartik Mandaville, Founder and CEO |
What they do
SpringVerify sells employment background verification as a service to HR and people teams, mostly at startups, SMBs and mid-market companies in India, with a smaller book of business in the United States through a separate us.springverify.com storefront. A company uploads a candidate’s details, the candidate consents digitally, and SpringVerify runs the requested checks and returns a report through a dashboard or an API, rather than the paper-form-and-courier process that legacy verification agencies still use.
- Check types offered: identity, criminal record, employment history, education, address, and more than 20 check categories in total (SpringVerify India website, accessed September 2026).
- Integrations: more than 100 HRIS, ATS and HRMS platforms, positioned as the product’s main differentiator versus older verification agencies (SpringVerify India website; HROne’s 2026 background-verification roundup).
- Named enterprise and mid-market customers referenced in the company’s own case studies and site copy: HackerEarth, Zinnov, Kotak Mahindra Asset Management, OnJuno, WazirX, Blue Ridge and Sprinto (SpringVerify India website and customer-stories page, accessed September 2026).
- Scale claim: more than 3,500 customer organisations, spanning bands from 1-50 employees up to 1,000-10,000 employees (SpringVerify customer-stories page, company-stated, accessed September 2026).
The origin
Kartik Mandaville, the founder, has said in his own account on the company blog that he started coding at age six in Delhi, built a Facebook birthday-wishes application in college that picked up a large user base, then went on to work on IBM Watson while doing a master’s in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, and later served as CTO-in-residence at the Santa Monica accelerator Science, working alongside early-stage companies including DogVacay and Dollar Shave Club (Springworks blog, “My Story: Kartik Mandaville, CEO of Springworks”). That is where the company now called Springworks began, in 2014, as SpringRole (Crunchbase; Inc42 company profile).
The founding insight was not background verification at all. Mandaville had struggled to land internships despite strong technical skills, sending applications to roughly 200 companies in his freshman year and getting only about 20 replies and five interview calls, by his own account. That personal frustration with how hiring actually worked, not a market study, is what pushed him to build a company around fixing recruiting rather than take a conventional job.
The struggle years
SpringRole’s first idea, in 2014, was a crowdsourced recruiting marketplace built on referrals, at one point described as “Uber for Recruiters” (Crunchbase; Inc42). That did not become the company’s lasting business. By 2017-2018 the team had rebuilt SpringRole around a very different premise: a decentralised, blockchain-based professional network in which employers and universities would write verified attestations about a person’s work history and education directly onto a blockchain, competing in spirit with LinkedIn’s profile data rather than with any background-check firm.
To fund that vision, SpringRole ran its own token sale. The SPRING token, an ERC-20 token, opened its pre-sale on 10 May 2018 and closed the public sale on 31 July 2018, raising $1,827,650, against a stated soft cap of $1 million and hard cap of $12 million (CryptoSlate; ICODrops). Separately, on 14 May 2018, the company closed a $1.3 million private funding round from AlphaBlock Investments, DNA — the blockchain investment and consulting firm founded by Brock Pierce and Scott Walker — Isaac Lee’s BlockWater, and Wavemaker Genesis (YourStory, May 2018; Inc42, May 2018). By September 2019 that blockchain-first identity had itself been retired: the company said its original name “SpringRole” no longer captured the scope of what it was building and rebranded the parent company as Springworks, folding SpringRole’s blockchain-verified-profile product in alongside newer, more conventional tools including SpringVerify and a free applicant tracking system, SpringRecruit (Springworks blog, “SpringRole is now Springworks. Here’s why,” 9 September 2019). The same post noted the blockchain profile product had reached “49,250+ users” within about a year of its own launch, a real number of users attached to a product line that nonetheless did not become the company’s business.
The turning point
The turning point was not a single funding event or a press release moment; it was the decision, formalised in that September 2019 rebrand, to stop describing the company by its blockchain ambitions and let SpringVerify, a product that had quietly launched alongside the token sale in 2018, become the flagship instead. On one side of that line sat close to five years of work: a discarded referral-marketplace model from 2014, a blockchain professional-network pitch that had raised $1.3 million in equity and $1.83 million in token sales by mid-2018, and a user base in the tens of thousands with no disclosed revenue model to match. On the other side sat SpringVerify, a background-verification product the company’s own blog described in July 2019 as built to replace “paper forms, collecting hard copies of documents” with a digital process, citing a CareerBuilder estimate that a bad hire costs a company roughly $17,000 to correct (SpringVerify blog, 4 July 2019, updated 12 May 2022).
By FY25, six years after that rebrand, the arithmetic had flipped. Springrole India Private Limited, the entity that runs SpringVerify and the rest of the Springworks suite, was posting ₹10-50 crore in annual revenue with profit growing year on year (Tofler), serving more than 3,500 customer organisations (SpringVerify, company-stated), without having raised another funding round since 2018.
The money behind it
- March 2018: a $370,000 seed round is recorded against the SpringVerify entity (Tracxn; Crunchbase).
- 14 May 2018: a $1.3 million private round, backed by AlphaBlock Investments, DNA (Brock Pierce and Scott Walker), Isaac Lee’s BlockWater, and Wavemaker Genesis (YourStory, May 2018; Inc42, May 2018).
- May-July 2018: a separate $1,827,650 SPRING token sale (ICO), structured outside conventional equity financing (CryptoSlate; ICODrops).
- No further institutional equity round is recorded for Springworks, SpringRole or SpringVerify after May 2018, as of the data available on Tracxn and Crunchbase in September 2026.
- Valuation: not publicly disclosed at any point. The company has not made a valuation claim, and none of the funding-tracking sources reviewed carry one.
In other words, everything SpringVerify has built since 2019 — its customer base, its headcount, its revenue — has been funded out of the business itself rather than out of a later venture round, which is unusual for a company competing against better-capitalised rivals in the same market (see “The risks,” below).
How it makes money
- Money in: SpringVerify charges per candidate or per verification package rather than a flat subscription; the company does not publish a public rate card, and reviewers note “no easily accessible official rate card for all packages,” with extra charges for international or re-initiation checks (HROne’s 2026 background-verification roundup).
- Costs out: the core cost base for a verification company is the underlying data lookups and manual follow-up (courts, employers, universities, address verification agents) needed to close a check, plus the engineering and support cost of the more than 100 HRIS/ATS/HRMS integrations the product maintains (SpringVerify India website).
- Where the margin sits: SpringVerify’s own case studies advertise speed as the product’s edge over legacy verification agencies — for example, 94% of HackerEarth’s checks and 88.36% of WazirX’s more than 250 verifications were completed within two weeks (SpringVerify customer-stories page) — which matters because a faster check reduces the cost of keeping a requisition open, even where the per-check fee itself is not disclosed.
- The part people get wrong: SpringVerify is often shopped as a single “instant background check” tool, but HROne’s independent review found turnaround “varies by check” and that “certain verifications can require up to 10 working days,” cautioning buyers against treating a 48-hour headline figure as a blanket service-level guarantee for comprehensive packages.
- Cross-sell: SpringVerify sits inside a wider Springworks product suite — EngageWith (employee recognition and rewards), SpringRecruit (a free applicant tracking system) and Goodfit — sold to the same HR buyer, which spreads customer-acquisition cost across more than one product line (Springworks about-us page).
The numbers
SpringVerify’s operating entity, Springrole India Private Limited, does not publish a detailed multi-year income statement, and the free tier of Registrar-of-Companies data aggregators shows revenue in bands and year-on-year percentage changes rather than exact rupee figures for every year. The clearest read available this month is below.
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Revenue, YoY | Net profit, YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY22 (year to March 2022) | Not disclosed in exact terms | +46.0% | -13.5% |
| FY24 (year to March 2024) | ₹1-100 crore (wide disclosure band) | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| FY25 (year to March 2025) | ₹10-50 crore | +16.8% to +17% | +8.0% |
Sourcing note: the FY22 and FY25 year-on-year percentage changes and the FY24-FY25 revenue bands come from TheCompanyCheck’s and Tofler’s published analyses of Springrole India Private Limited’s Registrar of Companies filings, both accessed in September 2026. A separate, contested figure exists: private-company revenue database GetLatka reported Springworks (the whole product suite, not SpringVerify alone) crossing $27.3 million in estimated annual recurring revenue in September 2025 — roughly ₹262 crore at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 — which is far above the ₹10-50 crore India-entity revenue band in the same period (GetLatka, accessed September 2026). The two figures likely measure different things: one is the audited-style filing of the Indian operating entity, the other is a self-reported, unaudited estimate of the group’s global annualised run rate. Both are named here because they conflict and neither can be dismissed outright; a reader should treat GetLatka’s number as a company-adjacent estimate rather than a filed figure.
Headcount, a proxy for scale where revenue disclosure is thin: 248 employees as of July 2024 (GetLatka) growing to 280 employees as of May 2026 (Tracxn’s profile of Springrole India Private Limited) — consistent with a company still adding staff without new outside capital.
Where the money comes from
- Product split: SpringVerify (background verification) is the flagship and the one with disclosed named enterprise customers; EngageWith, SpringRecruit, Goodfit and Trivia are adjacent HR-tech tools sold to the same buyer inside people teams (Springworks about-us page).
- Geography split: India, through in.springverify.com, is the core market and the one with the company’s Bengaluru headquarters and the bulk of its named case studies; a smaller, separate United States storefront operates at us.springverify.com with its own signup and API documentation (SpringVerify websites, accessed September 2026).
- Customer-size split: SpringVerify’s own site groups customers into 1-50, 50-200, 200-1,000 and 1,000-10,000-employee bands, and independent buyer’s guides consistently place it as strongest with startups and SMBs rather than the largest regulated enterprises (SpringVerify customer-stories page; HROne 2026 roundup, which ranks AuthBridge ahead of SpringVerify for large enterprise and BFSI accounts).
- The surprise: a background-verification company usually chases the big, regulated banking and financial-services accounts, because that is where compliance-driven check volumes are largest. SpringVerify instead built its base and its case-study library around fast-growing startups (HackerEarth, WazirX, OnJuno, Sprinto), leaving the BFSI-heavy enterprise segment mostly to AuthBridge and IDfy (HROne 2026 roundup).
The risks
- Regulatory exposure under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023: background verification, by its nature, involves collecting identity documents, employment records and sometimes criminal-record data, which the Act treats as sensitive. SpringVerify’s own guidance to employers flags that a separate consent notice is required “for each type of verification (identity, employment, address, criminal, education, etc.),” that unnecessary document collection (for example, asking for Aadhaar when PAN would do) breaches the Act’s data-minimisation principle, and that vendor contracts must carry DPDP-specific clauses even though the hiring employer, not SpringVerify, retains ultimate compliance responsibility (SpringVerify India blog on DPDP and background verification, 2024). A verification vendor that mishandles this is exposed to both reputational and regulatory risk on behalf of every client it serves.
- Competitive intensity from better-capitalised rivals: AuthBridge has raised roughly $11.2 million across nine rounds since 2009 (Tracxn), while IDfy was valued at about $114 million (₹1,000 crore) in early 2024 and later raised $23 million at a $256 million valuation in June 2026, explicitly to fund acquisitions and international expansion (Biometric Update, June 2026; Tracxn). SpringVerify, without a funding round since 2018, has less fresh capital to match rivals on enterprise sales teams, acquisitions or overseas expansion, even as HROne’s 2026 review already ranks it behind AuthBridge and IDfy for the largest, most complex accounts.
- Demand tied to hiring cycles at its core customer segment: because SpringVerify’s stated pricing model is per-candidate rather than a flat subscription, and its customer base skews toward startups and SMBs (HROne 2026 roundup), a slowdown in hiring at that segment — the kind seen across Indian tech during 2022-2024 layoffs and funding slowdowns — reduces check volume and therefore revenue directly, in a way that a fixed-fee enterprise software subscription would not.
The takeaway
The lesson in SpringVerify’s history is not that pivoting is bad; most durable companies pivot. It is that the first two ideas here were exciting because they were fashionable — a referral marketplace during the sharing-economy wave, then a blockchain identity protocol during the 2017-2018 token boom — and both were funded on the strength of that fashion rather than on evidence that customers would pay for them at scale. The idea that worked was the unglamorous one sitting next to the actual product: employers already using SpringRole’s ecosystem needed background checks done properly, and nobody serving them was doing it well. The team only noticed because they were already in the room. The transferable lesson is to audit what your existing customers are asking you to fix around the edges of your product before chasing the next well-funded trend, because the boring adjacent problem is sometimes the only one with a real, provable customer willing to pay today.
Frequently asked questions
What does SpringVerify do?
SpringVerify runs employment background checks — identity, criminal record, employment history, education and address verification, among other checks — for HR teams at companies mostly in India and the United States, integrating with more than 100 HRIS, ATS and HRMS platforms (SpringVerify India website).
Who founded SpringVerify and when did it start?
Kartik Mandaville founded the parent company in 2014, initially as SpringRole, a recruiting-referral marketplace that later became a blockchain-based professional network; SpringVerify launched as a distinct background-verification product in 2018, and the parent company was renamed Springworks in September 2019 (Crunchbase; Springworks blog, 9 September 2019).
How much money has SpringVerify raised?
Public trackers show a $370,000 seed round in March 2018, a $1.3 million private round in May 2018 backed by AlphaBlock Investments, DNA, BlockWater and Wavemaker Genesis, and a separate $1.83 million SPRING token sale between May and July 2018. No further institutional funding round has been recorded since (Tracxn; Crunchbase; YourStory, May 2018; CryptoSlate).
Is SpringVerify profitable?
Tofler’s analysis of Registrar of Companies filings for Springrole India Private Limited, the entity behind SpringVerify, shows net profit growing year on year in FY25 (year to March 2025), alongside revenue in the ₹10-50 crore band, though the company does not publish exact profit figures itself.
How is SpringVerify different from AuthBridge and IDfy?
Independent buyer’s guides rank AuthBridge ahead for large enterprise and BFSI accounts and IDfy ahead for fintechs needing the fastest digital turnaround, while placing SpringVerify’s strength in integrations, workflow automation and candidate experience for startups and SMBs (HROne’s 2026 background-verification roundup). AuthBridge and IDfy have also raised significantly more outside capital — IDfy alone was valued at roughly $256 million in a June 2026 round (Biometric Update) — while SpringVerify has grown since 2019 without a further funding round.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- YourStory, May 2018 — “Blockchain professional network SpringRole closes a $1.3 million private funding round”
- Inc42, May 2018 — “Blockchain-based Job Listing Startup SpringRole Closes $1.3 Mn Private Funding”
- CryptoSlate — “SpringRole (SPRING) ICO (Token Sale) Details,” accessed September 2026
- ICODrops — “SpringRole (SPRING), All information about SpringRole ICO,” accessed September 2026
- Springworks blog, 9 September 2019 — “SpringRole is now Springworks. Here’s why”
- Springworks blog — “My Story: Kartik Mandaville, CEO of Springworks,” accessed September 2026
- SpringVerify blog, 4 July 2019, updated 12 May 2022 — “The Why Behind Everything We Do at SpringVerify and SpringRole”
- SpringVerify India blog, 2024 — “DPDP & Background Verification: Changes for Employers”
- Tracxn — SpringVerify company profile, accessed September 2026
- Tracxn — Springworks company profile, accessed September 2026
- Tracxn — Springrole India Private Limited legal entity profile, accessed September 2026
- Tracxn — IDfy company profile and valuation data, accessed September 2026
- Tracxn — AuthBridge funding profile, accessed September 2026
- Tofler — Springrole India Private Limited company financials page, accessed September 2026
- TheCompanyCheck — Springrole India Private Limited, FY2025 insights, accessed September 2026
- GetLatka — Springworks revenue and team-size profile, accessed September 2026
- Crunchbase — Springrole/Springworks organisation profiles and Kartik Mandaville person profile, accessed September 2026
- SpringVerify India website (in.springverify.com) and customer-stories page, accessed September 2026
- HROne, 2026 — “10 Best Background Verification Companies In India”
- Biometric Update, June 2026 — “Indian identity verification firm IDfy raises $23M at $256M valuation”
- The Arc — “IDfy nears $25 mn ARR, expects 40% growth in FY25,” accessed September 2026
- Trading Economics — Indian Rupee exchange rate data, accessed September 2026
- Springworks about-us page, accessed September 2026
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