(Photo | by Anete Lusina)
Central Oregon continues to attract new businesses and those looking to relocate from other areas, and the high-tech sector is part of the influx. Cognito, an identity verification company founded in Palo Alto, California in 2014, moved its headquarters to Sisters about a year ago, and has been on a steady growth path ever since.
“We chose Sisters for our new headquarters in part due to the unpublicized, growing high-tech-knowledge employment base that the community possesses,” says Alain Meier, co-founder and CEO. “Cognito saw the need to grow in a location where we can hire incredible talent that have a variety of different interests and backgrounds.”
Justin Goodkind, Cognito’s director of sales, had formerly worked for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation and vacationed in Central Oregon all his life, he says. “I developed a relationship with Roger Lee, (CEO of Economic Development for Central Oregon), and we attempted to collaborate on several things between Los Angeles and Central Oregon. I have always felt very strongly about this region and the opportunities it can afford people. My goal has always been to bring more business here. Moving Cognito to Sisters has been an opportunity to help relocate more high-value business here.”
Cognito was founded by Meier, John Backus and Chris Morton under the name BlockScore, which is still the company’s legal name. “They got their start coming out of Stanford. They were really looking for ways to improve identity verification and what is called watchlist screening,” explains Goodkind. Meier had helped launch the Stanford Bitcoin Group while studying at Stanford University, where he recognized the need for more advanced anti-fraud and compliance tools for businesses. During that time he joined Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley-based seed money startup accelerator that has helped more than 2,000 companies launch since 2005.
While in Y Combinator, the team began supporting companies such as Brex, Coinbase, Current and Nextdoor, helping them to scale onboarding while satisfying regulatory compliance requirements. Today, Cognito has over 500 clients, representing more than 100 million individuals through its platform, and it continues to carve a niche in the financial services industry as a fintech leader.
“Companies have to verify that the people they are working with or providing services to can legally do business. It’s called KYC (know your customer) watchlist screening,” explains Goodkind. This process is primarily needed with individuals, he says, such as when a bank is opening a new account with a customer and needs to ensure that the person is not on a watchlist of any kind and is safe to do business with. “That was the original business we started with, and we’ve iterated on that several times to create a modern solution for businesses. On the identity verification side, we can take a ten-digit U.S. phone number and combine it with just an individual’s name, and from that we can do a complete identity verification.”
Goodkind says that on the watchlist screening side of Cognito, they have several clients with millions of customers. “Our differentiating factor is that we are able to screen on a daily basis and let them know if any of their customers have shown up on a watchlist between yesterday and today. We can do that across 18 languages. You can put someone’s name in with Chinese characters, and get it back in any language, from Latin to Arabic. The languages also include non-Latin sets.”
Notable Cognito customers include Coinbase, Quadpay and Nextdoor. “Primarily, a good percentage of our business is financial companies, but we also service companies that need age verifications, like e-cigarette companies, or address verifications, like Nextdoor,” says Goodkind.
Though Cognito is a fully distributed workforce company with all employees working remotely, Goodkind says that at one point, they maintained an office in Palo Alto, but it was very expensive to do so. In 2018, Goodkind — who had since moved to Central Oregon — was hired by Cognito. “After I was hired, I very quickly wanted to bring on employees for other roles, including our account manager, and she lives in Sisters. Soon after, the company realized there were significant advantages to moving the legal headquarters to Central Oregon.” An office space became available in Sisters at the FivePine Lodge complex, he says, so the decision was made to legally move the company there. While the staff all still work from home, the office space in Sisters serves as the legal headquarters and provides a meeting space.
“We have now hired three people who live in Central Oregon for jobs that are highly tech and highly paid. Cognito allows our employees to buy lunch on the company on a daily basis. We also pay for gym memberships, and we are happy to pay for coffee, desks or anything else needed to make the home environment appropriate for work,” says Goodkind. “The company is paying for things that amount to as much as $5,000-$6,000 per employee, and this benefits the local economy in Central Oregon.” He adds,
“We brought on our third Central Oregon hire about seven months ago. We are expanding as fast as we can. In fall of 2018 when I came on, we had eight employees; now we are at 18-19. And we are just about to post another position: We hope to find a local hire for a sales development representative. We are on a pretty fast growth track.”
He continues, “It’s great here. We love it. EDCO is tremendously supportive. They have helped us find skilled employment, offered many introductions and offered to help us navigate tax incentives and hiring credits. These are all things we are looking into. This is an exciting time of growth for us; we have some really exciting projects coming up.”
