Pandemic Darlings The pandemic economy, in original documents
Home Profiles Rick Song

Profiles · Principals

ProfilePerson

Rick Song

Executive

PPP
Type
Person
Role
Executive
Programs
PPP
Updated

The profile

Co-founder and CEO of Persona, an identity-verification company used in Square Capital's and Womply's PPP application flows; Persona took no PPP loan.

Identity and role

Rick Song is the co-founder and CEO of Persona Identities, Inc., a San Francisco identity-verification company that sells configurable identity infrastructure. He has run it since founding it in 2018 and still does; he was quoted as co-founder and CEO in the April 2025 announcement of the company's $200 million round at a $2 billion valuation.

Biography

Song studied at Rice University (Boardroom Leaders profile) and then worked at Square, where by his own account he spent about five years, including on Square Capital and identity work (First Round podcast). The Kleiner Perkins fellowship cited in some profiles is not carried in the sources we have.

He started Persona in 2018 with Charles Yeh, the company's CTO, who came from Dropbox; the two met at a summer internship in 2012 (Contrary Research). Song's framing for the company is an infrastructure one: do for identity what AWS did for compute. A Forbes 30 Under 30 listing is cited in some profiles but not carried in the sources we have.

The company and its PPP role

Persona sells a configurable identity engine: government-ID checks, document and selfie/liveness checks, database checks, watchlist and sanctions screening, phone and email verification, case management, link analysis, and workflow orchestration. The pitch is that a customer can dial the verification waterfall up or down to fit its own risk tolerance.

Persona's PPP footprint runs through two customers. Persona's own Square case study says it automated identity verification of Paycheck Protection Program applicants for Square Capital and that more than 10,000 businesses were verified that way. The second is Womply. In Womply's arbitration against Benworth Capital Partners, the corrected final award records Womply's testimony that Fast Lane "verified identity using Persona" and lists Persona among the stack's third-party providers; fraud-industry reporting (Frank on Fraud) describes scammers trying to beat the selfie check with masks and mannequin faces pasted onto fake licenses. Claims that Persona also ran OFAC and PEP screening for PPP applicants are not carried in the sources we have. Outside the Square page, Persona said almost nothing publicly about PPP.

Persona supplied the identity check; the platform set its parameters.

Their own relief

A search of the ProPublica PPP database under Persona's name found no loan to the identity company, and we found no EIDL record. Persona closed its Series A in January 2020 and its Series B in May 2021 (Business Wire and TechCrunch).

Persona has drawn the biometric-privacy litigation common to liveness and selfie vendors. In Washington v. Persona Identities, Inc., decided by an Illinois appellate court in August 2024, two DoorDash delivery applicants brought a putative class action under the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act, alleging Persona collected and profited from their facial-geometry scans without the required disclosures. Persona tried to compel arbitration as a third-party beneficiary of DoorDash's contractor agreement; the trial court agreed, but the appellate court reversed and remanded the case. It found Persona's role was to aid, not administer, DoorDash's background checks.

Separately, in February 2026 Fortune reported that publicly exposed Persona frontend code showed a pipeline of 269 individual checks; the episode pulled in Discord, which distanced itself, and drew scrutiny of Persona's Founders Fund backing. Persona denied operational relationships with Palantir or US government agencies. We found no enforcement action against Persona or Song; the FTC's Fast Lane action was against Womply, not Persona.

Where they are now (2025–2026)

In April 2025 Persona raised $200 million at a $2 billion valuation, co-led by Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital (PR Newswire, Founders Fund had led the 2021 Series C). Forbes (we have a copy) describes Song reframing the company around AI-driven bot and age-assurance problems, with Reddit and OpenAI among the customers named. The company says it operates in 200-plus countries (PR Newswire).

Sources held in this archive

Original source documents and archived captures

Sources

Back to top