Persona, the verified identity platform used by LinkedIn, Etsy, and Affirm, today announced that it has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Identity Verification for the second consecutive year. This also marks the third consecutive year Persona is positioned highest for Ability to Execute amongst 12 vendors.
In the accompanying 2026 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Identity Verification report, Persona ranked #1 across two evaluated Use Cases: Risk Mitigation and Consumer.
Identity infrastructure that adapts as fast as the threats and regulatory landscape around it
The newly published Gartner Hype Cycle™ for Digital Identity, 2026 describes a landscape being reshaped by AI agents and evolving threats, citing the firm’s 2025 Machine Identity survey, which found that 94% of organizations now contend with increased machine identities, largely driven by AI agent deployments. That shift is straining identity solutions designed around a simpler assumption: that everyone logging in is a person.
As those pressures mount and regulations proliferate across industries and geographies, organizations need verification infrastructure that can flex with them: flows tailored to their risk tolerance and user signals, and data practices they control. Persona’s platform lets teams configure all of it without re-architecting their stack as requirements change or compromising on the privacy of the people being verified.
“I believe being named a Leader by Gartner for the second consecutive year reflects the hard work our team has put into building what our customers need: a platform that stays ahead of fraud and regulations without adding friction for real users or sacrificing data control,” said Rick Song, CEO and co-founder of Persona.
“That’s why we’ve invested in automation that takes people out of the loop where it matters, ways to verify a claim while keeping the underlying data private, verification that doesn’t turn real users away, and controls that let organizations set their own data policies,” Song added.
Recent milestones
Persona has achieved a number of key milestones over the past year, including:
- Launched Candidate Verification, extending fraud prevention to the hiring process with integrations for Ashby, Greenhouse, and Workday.
- Launched Relay: double-blind verification that confirms specific claims, like whether someone is over 18 or a real human, without sharing identity data with the requesting organization.
- More than tripled its integration library to 90+, including new connections to Microsoft Entra and Zoom.
- Expanded global digital ID support to include Germany and France EUDI Wallets, Singapore Singpass, Korea Credit Bureau digital ID, and Australia ConnectID.
- Launched native AI agents that triage, review, and deliver recommendations on incoming cases based on past decisions to cut manual review time.
- Achieved FedRAMP Moderate Authorization through the 20x Phase 2 pilot, a new process for continuous security validation. Persona was one of 13 cloud service providers selected for the pilot.
Helping organizations cut through complexity
With well over 100 vendors competing in the identity verification space, we believe independent evaluations like those from Gartner give organizations a clearer way to compare solutions on real capabilities rather than surface-level claims.
To us, being named a Leader for the second consecutive year reflects Persona’s commitment to building the infrastructure organizations need to verify real people, businesses, and agents online. As fraud grows more sophisticated and AI reshapes both the threats and the tools to stop them, Persona’s mission — keeping the internet human — only gets more important.
For more information about Persona’s verified identity platform and to access the full Gartner reports, visit: https://withpersona.com/gartner-magic-quadrant.
Gartner disclaimer
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Identity Verification, By Nayara Sangiorgio, Akif Khan, Zachary Smith, 28 July 2026.
Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Identity Verification, By Akif Khan, Nayara Sangiorgio, Zachary Smith, 29 July 2026.
Gartner, Hype Cycle for Digital Identity, 2026, Zachary Smith, Nayara Sangiorgio, 6 July 2026
Gartner, Hype Cycle, and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About Persona
Persona Identities, Inc. (Persona) offers a unified identity platform that gives organizations the building blocks they need to securely collect, verify, manage, and make decisions about individuals’ and businesses’ identities — along with automation and orchestration tools to streamline the entire process from end to end.
Founded in 2018, Persona is headquartered in San Francisco and is available in 200+ countries and territories and 20 different languages. Persona supports consumer-facing businesses across a variety of sectors including public sector agencies, retail, fintech, marketplace, delivery services, real estate and hospitality, HR, edtech, legal services, home and childcare services, and more. For additional information, please visit withpersona.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260803744596/en/
Media gallery
