Founder's Story
AI Scams Are Ruining Lives – Now We’re Fighting Back | Ep. 200 with Ricardo Amper CEO of Incode
14 Apr 2025
In this urgent and eye-opening episode of Founder's Story, Daniel sits down with Ricardo Amper, the CEO and Founder of Incode, the revolutionary identity verification platform trusted by Amazon, Citibank, and even U.S. elections.Ricardo reveals how deepfakes, AI fraud, and impersonation scams are rapidly increasing—and why the future of the internet depends on solving trust. From building a pre-Facebook social app to securing elections with facial biometrics, his journey is filled with unexpected pivots, high-stakes innovation, and global impact.If you've ever wondered how we’ll know who’s real in the AI era, this episode answers it.Topics Covered:Ricardo’s failed first startup and why timing matters more than you thinkThe near fraud that almost cost Incode a major dealWhy AI is breaking the internet—and how Incode is fixing itHow governments and Fortune 500s are using IncodeThe future of digital identity, trust, and agentic AIWhat Ricardo believes is the next frontier after facial recognitionHow identity fraud is impacting everyone from small businesses to democracy itselfGuest Info:Ricardo Amper Founder & CEO, Incode 🌐 https://incode.comOur Sponsors:* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com
Full Episode
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Build, scale, and enjoy the incredible results. You can do it all yourself on Wix. Hey everyone, welcome back to Founders Story. Today we have Ricardo Amper, the CEO and founder of InCode. And this is gonna be a very interesting topic today because it's something that we've been discussing in other episodes, but we never found a company who's really solving this issue.
So that's why I am stoked to have you, Ricardo, but you are reinventing identity verification to power trust worldwide, which is what we need. So before we dive into all those things, because this is going to be so critical. I'd like to understand how did you even get started in this field, in this industry, and why are you solving this problem?
Well, thank you, Daniel. Thank you for inviting me here. It's a long story. I learned entrepreneurship from my dad. And then when I was in college, Back in 99, so it's a long time ago, I wanted internet to be more fun. That was like pre-Facebook. And I started a company called The Bubble. And it was the same concept as Facebook years before that.
But I learned a hard lesson, which is that timing is very important because I started... late 99 incorporated April, 2000, when was the dot-com crashed, raised a little bit of money and then I couldn't raise more money. And so my first experience was actually the failure that taught me to always be humble and how there's a matter of timing and chance in everything that you do.
So you need to be able to be incredibly resilient. Then after that, I started a beverage company that I sold to a CPG company, the biggest bread company in the world. And then a turnaround of a personal story where my dad passed away. I had to quit business school, go and do a turnaround of his company that I eventually sold to a big public chemical multinational. And then years after that,
I was able to pursue my passion, which was in technology. And we started in code, but we started with a very different thing. We were in back in 2015, we were sharing photos with facial recognition. So we had an app that you would take pictures with your friends and they would automatically be shared or photos that you never shared were shared based on facial recognition.
Which I think was a terrible idea. But the one thing that was a very good idea was that we built an amazing team of engineers. We were solving things in a way that nobody was doing that, meaning doing AI on the phone before it was a thing. And then we got a little bit lucky. Apple kind of made facial recognition okay.
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