Persona Chief Operating Officer Christie Kim said in a Feb. 20 customer email that the company has no contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or any agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and no business relationship with Palantir.
The statement follows reports that security researchers discovered exposed frontend source maps on a non-production Persona subdomain, prompting questions about the company's clients and data practices. Kim sent the email, titled "Note regarding recent news about Persona and Discord," to customers after these reports surfaced. In the message, she said, "These engagements are strictly for workforce account security of government employees and do not include ICE or any agency within the Department of Homeland Security. He is not on our board, does not advise us, has no role in our operations or decision-making, and is not directly involved with Persona in any way. Persona and Palantir share no board members and have no business relationship with each other," according to PiunikaWeb.
Kim also clarified that investor Peter Thiel has no board seat, advisory role, or operational involvement at Persona. She added that Founders Fund and other investors have zero access to personal user data, according to PiunikaWeb.
Persona's post-incident review said the exposed source maps were located on a test subdomain under withpersona-gov.com that had never hosted federal customers and contained zero customer data. The company reported an engineer enabled source maps during development of a new compute architecture, and the subdomain was disabled within an hour of discovery. Persona said no API keys, secrets, credentials, or customer data existed in the frontend code, according to Persona's blog.
Kim serves as Chief Operating Officer at Persona Identities, Inc., a San Francisco-based identity verification platform founded in 2018. The company raised $200 million in Series D funding in April 2025 at a $2 billion valuation co-led by Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital. Persona processed more than 300 million verifications in 2024 and operates in over 200 countries and territories, according to PR Newswire.
The global identity verification market is projected to grow from $14.34 billion in 2025 to $29.32 billion by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of 15.4 percent. The Federal Trade Commission recorded over 1.1 million identity theft cases in the U.S. in 2023 as Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering regulations drive adoption of biometric authentication across sectors, MarketsandMarkets reported.
