DevCode Identity hit a familiar inflection point a couple of years into the build. The product worked. The customers were happy. The growth curve was clean. And the operating model that got the company there was starting to bend.

The challenge that defines KYC in any regulated industry is the same everywhere. On one side, the regulator. On the other, the conversion funnel. Compliance officers want every flag investigated, every signal documented, every cycle defensible. Growth and product teams want every legitimate user to land on the other side of onboarding without friction. The vendor sitting in the middle has to deliver both, or it loses one of the two parties.

A traditional KYC vendor, the kind you bolt in once and call done, cannot serve this. Not because the technology is bad, but because the rules layer changes faster than the vendor can update.

Orchestration is what wins where rules-based KYC stalls.

What orchestration unlocks

The DevCode Identity bet is that orchestration is the right primitive. Not a single KYC provider, but a runtime that talks to hundreds of ID providers and data sources, lets compliance teams define their own flows, and adapts to new jurisdictions without a vendor change. The customer keeps both the conversion outcome and the audit defensibility.

The trade-off is real. Orchestration is harder to sell, harder to onboard, and demands more from the customer compliance team. But it scales in a way that pure-KYC products do not.

Through the messy middle

The path through the scaling phase was unglamorous. Hire compliance specialists who can speak both regulator language and growth-team language. Deepen the partner network of ID providers and data sources. Ship rule-builder tooling so compliance officers can self-serve without engineering tickets. And push AI into the audit defensibility layer so flagged cases come with reasoning, not just scores.

The team planning horizon is no longer about a single growth target. It is about deciding which adjacent vertical, fintech, regulated marketplaces, payments, gets the next investment of build capacity.

— In conversation with Olivia Englund, CEO DevCode Identity