Company / San Francisco
About Stile.
We are building Stile to make fraud harder without making the internet more invasive. Identity verification has spent years getting better at checking documents. Fraud has moved faster, and the cost of getting identity wrong now shows up far beyond signup. Stile brings an operator’s view and an infrastructure engineer’s discipline to the same problem.
Why we started
Identity verification was not keeping up with how fraud worked in practice.
Alex saw the gap while buying and operating identity products. Vlad saw it in the systems beneath them, where performance and architecture determine whether a product survives outside the happy path. Stile grew out of putting those experiences together and designing identity verification around real operations.
Alex Marinov
Serial entrepreneur / Co-founder and CEO
Alex started his first company while he was still in college and has been building businesses ever since. He went on to build RCG Logistics and TRUKT, staying close enough to day-to-day operations to see how quickly an identity gap becomes a real business problem. After two decades as an entrepreneur, he sees Stile as his most ambitious project yet.
Vlad Marinov
Systems engineer / Co-founder and CTO
Vlad has spent a decade building and optimizing identity and fintech systems, including engineering work at Checkr, Capital One, and Apple. He is obsessed with performance, architecture, and what happens at the P95, not just whether a system works on the happy path. At Stile, he brings that discipline to infrastructure developers can understand, debug, and depend on under real load.
What we believe
Identity should help people act, not help systems watch them.
Fight fraud without treating everyone like a suspect.
Better controls should make consequential moments safer without making ordinary people prove themselves everywhere. More fraud should not mean more surveillance.
Privacy belongs in the engineering.
Fraud getting smarter should not mean people leave a bigger trail. Keep raw IDs from spreading across systems. Do not turn every check into a permanent profile.
Stay close to where things go wrong.
Operators see how controls break in the field. Engineers know where systems can change. The product gets better when that conversation stays short, specific, and connected to the people doing the work.
How we build
Use leverage. Own the result.
Stile is deliberately small. The point of leverage is to get closer to the work, not further from responsibility.
Customers talk to the people building Stile.
Operators and developers show us where identity creates friction or fails to answer the real question. The person hearing the problem can make the decision, change the product, and watch what happens next.
Use AI heavily. Still do the thinking.
AI helps with research, design, code, testing, and operations. It lets a small team cover more ground. People still choose the direction, review the work, and fix what breaks.
Let developers start before sales.
Self-service registration gives a developer an API key instantly and a free sandbox. Public plans are usage-based. Starting should not depend on a sales call, a platform fee, or buying seats for a dashboard.
Give people and agents the same current source.
Available now We publish
llms.txt, the complete docs as a machine-readable file, and an OpenAPI 3.1 contract.What we’re building Agents will help draft workflows, configure integrations, and guide production setup. A developer will review the code. The customer will decide what goes live.
Start free, or tell us what you are seeing.
Build in the sandbox, or bring us the moment where identity stops adding up.