About Verifyfed
Built in Arlington, Virginia, by people who have worked inside federal program security — and saw identity verification as the process that never got fixed.
The Founding Story
Gabriel Faulkner spent nearly a decade working across federal program security environments — first as part of a security program team within a major defense contractor, then in a program security advisory capacity supporting federal system authorization efforts in the Northern Virginia contractor corridor.
In both roles, the same bottleneck appeared: identity verification for cleared contractor personnel was manual, paper-dependent, inconsistently documented, and disconnected from the access management systems that relied on it. Program work waited while security teams chased clearance confirmations. DCSA audits surfaced documentation gaps that no one had noticed because there was no systematic way to see them.
Verifyfed was founded in 2024 to address that specific problem — not identity verification in general, but the particular version of it that federal contractors face: clearance-aware, NISPOM-compliant, audit-trail-ready, and connected to the federal security control frameworks that program security officers are actually accountable for.
FOUNDER
Gabriel Faulkner
Founder & CEO
FOUNDED
2024 — Arlington, Virginia
FOCUS
Federal contractor identity verification — clearance-aware, NISPOM-compliant, FedRAMP-aligned
FUNDING
Seed round, 2024
"Make cleared contractor identity verification fast enough and auditable enough that it stops being a program security liability and becomes a program security asset."
Why this problem, why now.
Several converging policy and programmatic changes in 2023-2025 created a specific demand for better contractor identity verification infrastructure.
CMMC 2.0 Rollout
CMMC 2.0 Level 2 assessments are accelerating across the defense industrial base, bringing the IA domain identity practices into formal C3PAO assessment scope. Defense contractors who had informally handled identity verification now face assessed compliance requirements.
DCSA Digital Infrastructure Transition
DCSA's transition from DSS created new digital verification infrastructure expectations. The shift toward DISS and the eApp modernization effort created openings for programmatic integration of identity verification workflows that didn't exist under the legacy DSS systems.
EO 13587 Enforcement Maturity
Over a decade after EO 13587's issuance, agency program offices and OSD oversight are increasingly scrutinizing the quality of contractor Insider Threat Programs — and the identity verification foundation those programs depend on.
FedRAMP Govtech Expansion
FedRAMP expansion into govtech vendor evaluation is making federal contractors for the first time subject to the same identity framework scrutiny that federal agencies face — creating demand for govtech vendors who understand the FedRAMP IA control requirements for identity verification.
The Team
A small team with experience in federal program security, cleared-sector identity infrastructure, and compliance framework implementation.
Gabriel Faulkner
Founder & CEO
Background in federal program security and defense contractor security advisory. Built Verifyfed to address the identity verification bottleneck he observed firsthand across multiple programs.
Lauren Nakamura
Head of Compliance
Former CMMC Registered Practitioner with background in NIST SP 800-171 assessment support and FedRAMP authorization package development for govtech vendors.
Rohan Khanna
Head of Engineering
Prior experience building identity infrastructure for federal cloud programs. Leads platform architecture with focus on FedRAMP-aligned security controls and GovCloud deployment requirements.
David Mercer
Program Security Advisor
Former government contractor security professional with direct DCSA audit experience across multiple cleared facilities. Brings FSO operational perspective to platform design and compliance documentation.
Tanya Osei
Identity Platform Engineer
Identity and access management engineer with background in enterprise IAM platform development. Leads clearance-aware authentication implementation and verification engine development.
Arlington, Virginia
Verifyfed is headquartered at 1300 North 17th Street, Suite 1400 — in the Rosslyn corridor of Arlington, Virginia. The location is deliberate.
The Arlington / Northern Virginia corridor is where the federal contractor ecosystem operates — from Crystal City through Pentagon City to Rosslyn, this is where the program security officers, contracts directors, and cleared facility managers who are Verifyfed's buyers work.
Building a federal contractor identity verification company from inside this ecosystem — not from Silicon Valley, not from a generic SaaS hub — means the product is built by people who understand the buyer's operational reality and regulatory context firsthand.
Talk to the team.
Schedule a security briefing to discuss how Verifyfed addresses the specific identity verification challenges of your program.
Schedule a Security Briefing