Welcome to
The Hive
At The Hive, we bring together a dynamic community of HR leaders, compliance experts, technologists, and thinkers who care about getting identity, hiring, and trust right.
Expect practical insights, bold ideas, and real-world stories from across the employment and identity landscape. Not just from ZipID, but from people like you. Because when we swarm together, we build smarter.
Valuing Humans: The Core of Entrepreneurship
Even as technology evolves, humans matter.
There's a question every founder should ask before building anything: Who does this actually serve?
Not in the abstract. Not in the pitch deck. In practice — in the daily lives of real people.
At ZipID, the answer has always been the same. We serve employers who are trying to build trustworthy teams. We serve new hires who deserve to be seen, verified, and welcomed with dignity. And we serve the millions of Americans whose stolen identities are quietly working jobs they never applied for, opening credit lines they don't know about, and accumulating tax liabilities they'll spend years untangling.
Technology — including ZipID's — is only as meaningful as the humans it serves.
That belief shapes everything we build. AI may be transformative. Biometric verification may be transformative. But the measure of that transformation isn't technical — it's human. It's the HR professional who can stop worrying about whether a document is real and start focusing on welcoming a new team member. It's the new hire who completes their I-9 in minutes without needing to understand federal compliance law. It's the American child whose Social Security number isn't quietly being used by someone else to get a job.
These aren't abstractions. They're the people at the center of what Form I-9 compliance is actually about.
What makes humans irreplaceable isn't efficiency — it's judgment, trust, and the capacity for genuine relationship. AI can verify a face. It cannot build a team. Technology can complete a form. It cannot earn loyalty. The organizations that will thrive are those that use tools like ZipID to handle what machines do well — so that people can do what only people can.
That's why, even as we push forward as a cutting-edge technology company, we hold old-school values as ZipID's cultural cornerstone: trust, integrity, and respect. Not as marketing language. As the operating system.
To be a valuable business, you must value humans. Everything else follows from that.
Janice Kephart is the Founder and CEO of ZipID, former counsel to the 9/11 Commission, and Homeland Security Director at MorphoTrak (now IDEMIA). She has testified before Congress 19 times on identity-related issues.
Ready to build a hiring process that values your people? View pricing →
Ready to verify your new hires with confidence?
ZipID completes the entire Form I-9 process in under 8 minutes, fully compliant with 8 CFR § 274a.2.
Schedule a Demo: https://calendly.com/janicek-zipidapp/
Get Started: https://www.zipidapp.com/pricing
Frequently Asked Questions
Is ZipID ICE-compliant I-9 software?
Yes. ZipID satisfies all five federal electronic I-9 system requirements under 8 CFR § 274a.2 — including compliant audit trails, electronic signature protocols, and secure storage standards. It is specifically designed to meet the March 2026 ICE reclassification that elevated common errors to substantive violations.
As of January 2025, I-9 paperwork violations carry fines of $288 to $2,861 per form under 8 CFR § 274a.10(b)(2). Knowingly hiring unauthorized workers carries fines up to $28,619 per worker for repeat offenses. ICE audit rates in 2025 ran at least ten times higher than the prior year.
ZipID is pursuing certified E-Verify third-party agent status by August 2026. Currently, after the employer signs the I-9, ZipID redirects to E-Verify and automatically populates the resulting case data into the Additional Information field — preserving the complete record for audit purposes.
What is NIST and why does it matter for I-9 verification?
NIST — the National Institute of Standards and Technology — is the federal agency that sets accuracy benchmarks for biometric identity technologies. For I-9 compliance, NIST validation matters because it provides an independent government-verified measure of whether a facial recognition system is reliable enough to trust. ZipID uses NIST-tested algorithms rated at 99.998% accuracy.
ZipID's 1:1 facial recognition is rated at 99.998% accuracy using NIST-validated algorithms — fewer than 2 mismatches per 100,000 verifications. Liveness detection is built in to confirm the selfie is from a real, present person rather than a photo or deepfake.
OCR — Optical Character Recognition — reads and extracts text from government-issued IDs. ZipID uses AI-powered OCR to instantly capture a new hire's ID data and automatically populate the required Form I-9 fields, eliminating manual entry and typos. The AI layer also cross-checks extracted data for logical consistency and flags tampered, synthetic, or spoofed documents.
ZipID uses NIST-validated biometric facial recognition to match a live selfie to the photo on the new hire's government-issued ID. AI-powered OCR extracts and autofills document data. Fraud detection runs in the background checking for tampered, synthetic, or spoofed documents.
Facial authentication is entirely the employer's choice. It confirms that the new hire is who they say they are and that the ID they present matches their live self — especially valuable for remote hires, high-security roles, or industries with elevated identity fraud risk.
How long does it take to complete an I-9 with ZipID?
ZipID completes the entire Form I-9 process — including identity verification, document capture, and E-Verify redirect — in under 8 minutes, for both remote and in-person new hires.
ZipID is an I-9 compliance and identity verification platform that combines facial recognition, OCR document capture, and fraud detection to verify new hire identities and complete Form I-9 in under 8 minutes — with a legally compliant audit trail built in. It is the only I-9 platform built by the person who helped write the federal identity doctrine behind the law.
Who built ZipID?
ZipID was founded by Janice Kephart, former counsel to the 9/11 Commission and a national security identity expert with 25 years of federal and private sector experience, including designing border biometric workflows at MorphoTrak, now Idemia. Kephart authored the federal identity doctrine and biometric entry-exit recommendations underlying today's I-9 compliance framework, and has testified before Congress 19 times.