Former Wave Financial CEO Kirk Simpson has wound down GoConfirm, the digital security app he co-founded after selling his previous company for over $500 million. The closure comes barely over a year after launching. The company had raised about US$6.5 million from a string of prominent startup investors, including OMERS Ventures, Wittington Ventures and Round13 Capital. 

GoConfirm, which was used to verify people’s identity in online transactions, shut down its app on Oct. 1 and laid off seven workers. Simpson told The Logic he and his co-founders—former OMERS Ventures executive Peter Carrescia and Moves Financial alum Sam Pajot-Phipps—have shifted their focus and are now working on a new idea.

The group began working on GoConfirm in 2022 and closed a seed round in June of that year to help finance the venture. Simpson said the team spent two years testing ways to build a user-controlled “wallet” that could reduce fraud in online interactions. They landed on serving peer-to-peer marketplaces, launching an app in June 2024 that let buyers and sellers confirm they were real and reliable before meeting to exchange concert tickets, for example, or electronics from Facebook Marketplace. 

Simpson said there was a lot of interest in this kind of tool to give people peace of mind when transacting with strangers online. “I’ve honestly never worked on a product where more people said, ‘this makes perfect sense, it needs to exist,’” he told The Logic. 

The challenge, he said, was getting masses of people to actually use the app. To spur adoption, the startup partnered with hundreds of Reddit communities—most ticket-exchange groups for events like TIFF and the Toronto Rave Community—whose moderators endorsed the app to cut down on scams. Those partnerships drove steady growth, said Simpson, but not the kind of viral, self-propelling uptake the company needed.

By the time the app shut down in October, Simpson said it had almost 100,000 users, far short of the “millions” of people the company had aimed to reach by then. 

Wittington Ventures managing partner Jim Orlando, an investor in the company, said the issue wasn’t just the size of the user base but the shape of the growth curve. The company was adding users at a steady, linear rate, he said, rather than accelerating the way a successful consumer app needs to. Because GoConfirm required both buyers and sellers to be verified for the tool to work, it created what he described as a chicken-and-egg problem: people were reluctant to join unless the other side of the transaction was already using it. “Ultimately, the call was this path is not going to get the exponential growth that we need,” Orlando said. 

While the app was free to start, Orlando and Simpson both said there were lots of ways to generate revenue—by, for example, taking a cut of users’ transactions or insuring purchases. The company never hit the critical mass of users it needed to start charging them, said Orlando. 

As second-time founders, Orlando said the team was quick to recognize when the numbers weren’t working in their favour. The company kept its burn rate low, he said, and cut its losses while it still had cash from its seed round to build something potentially more lucrative. 

“We felt like we needed to spend our time and our investors’ dollars in the best possible way, giving us the best possible chance to make something meaningful,” Simpson said. 

The three co-founders are now working on a new venture, centred on emerging AI infrastructure and likely unrelated to digital identity, Simpson said. He expects to unveil the group’s next project in early 2026.

Correction: Kirk Simpson’s first name was misspelled. This story has been updated.