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Johnny Ayers

Executive

Unemployment insurance
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
Unemployment insurance
Updated

The profile

Co-founder and CEO of Socure, an identity-verification and fraud-scoring company with state unemployment-agency and other government customers; Socure took no relief loan.

Identity and role

Johnny Ayers is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Socure, Inc., a digital identity-verification and fraud-scoring company. He has run it since late 2020. Socure was founded in New York and lists an Incline Village, Nevada address of record (Contrary Research and company materials). He remains CEO into 2026 (Q1 2026 results).

Biography

Ayers holds finance degrees from Boston College (Clay dossier, secondary). He co-founded Socure in New York in 2012 with Sunil Madhu, the original CEO (Contrary Research), and later became chief product officer.

Tom Thimot ran Socure as CEO from 2018 (company release), and in an announcement dated November 17, 2020, Ayers was named CEO (Business Wire and Finovate). The Clay dossier (secondary) lists his Switch Hit Ventures fund and 2022 awards.

The company and its relief role

Socure sells identity verification and fraud decisioning: its ID+ platform delivers identity checks through a single API; its Sigma models score for synthetic and first-party fraud; and RiskOS is its newer "AI-native" orchestration layer for identity, fraud, and compliance. Socure says its identity-resolution engine analyzes more than 8 billion records, including credit histories and utility information (GovTech, October 2021), and draws on email, phone, address, IP and device data (Socure).

There is no public record that Socure was a vetting vendor for the Paycheck Protection Program itself. Its government business grew out of pandemic unemployment fraud: in October 2021 it launched a public-sector business, citing pandemic unemployment fraud as the reason the market existed (GovTech). It has since published reports on fraud rings targeting government programs and received a FedRAMP "Moderate" authorization in March 2025; that release names the State of California among its government customers. Specific 2020–2021 relief contracts are not documented in the sources we have.

Their own relief

No relief located for Socure: a ProPublica PPP database search (cited) returns no loans under that name; EIDL is not covered by that database.

The litigation that names Ayers personally is Leinhardt v. Socure, Inc., in New York County Supreme Court, which also named co-founders Sunil Madhu and Gregory O'Connor; the plaintiff, tied to a 2017 transaction, brought books-and-records and fraud-type claims, and the Appellate Division, First Department, reversed and dismissed the complaint in 2026 (trial-court decision via Justia, capture is a stub; we do not have a copy of the appellate decision). No enforcement action against Socure or Ayers has been located.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

Socure's Q1 2026 update claimed more than $340 million in annual recurring revenue, up 62% year over year. In October 2024 the company agreed to buy the risk-decisioning startup Effectiv for $136 million (SecurityWeek). Its last priced equity valuation was the $4.5 billion set in the November 2021 Series E led by Accel and T. Rowe Price (TechCrunch). The company reported verifying more than 2.7 billion identity requests in 2024.

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources

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