Credibled was created in 2020 by Brad Semotiuk, who has run a staffing agency since 2003 and had the problem every week, and Elvine Assouline, who had never worked in recruitment and knew how to build the software. It took 2 years before there was a product either of them was willing to sell.
Brad SemotiukCo-founder
Elvine AssoulineCo-founder
01
How it started
This was the beginning.Toronto · empty desks, no product yet
01The problem
Brad Semotiuk founded Pure Staffing Solutions in 2003 and has been placing people ever since, into manufacturing, production, oil and gas, and resource roles across Canada. Every placement needed checking, and checking is where hiring slows down.
Reference checks were done by phone. A recruiter would call a former manager, leave a message, call again, and wait. Sometimes for days. Sometimes the call never came back at all. It is the slowest part of the job, the part that most often goes undone, and the part a client notices when a start date slips.
Criminal record checks were a different problem. They were priced as though every buyer was a large enterprise. If you were not running high volume, you paid a premium for the privilege of being small. Quoted prices varied wildly from one provider to the next, fees appeared that nobody had mentioned, and the products themselves were awkward to use. Nobody could tell you plainly what a check should cost.
There was also nobody to call. When a check stalled or a result came back wrong, Brad was filing a ticket and waiting, like everyone else. Nobody at the provider knew who he was, what he ran, or why the delay mattered that week. The people selling screening had decided that an account his size did not warrant a person.
So Brad had the idea. Automate the chasing, price the checks like the commodity they are, and give every account a person who knows it.
02The partner
Collision 2024, TorontoBrad with the Credibled stand sign. Booth A611, Alpha.
He brought it to Elvine Assouline, who had come through Grapevine6, a Toronto software company where he worked in product as it grew from 12 people to over 70 and was acquired by Seismic. Elvine knew how to turn a problem into a product.
The 2 of them had known each other since 2016, when Elvine came to Canada as an au pair for Brad's family, and had become friends in the years since. The company came much later.
Each had to learn the other's job before a product could exist. Brad had to understand what building software actually involves. Elvine had to understand recruitment from the inside, having never worked a day in it.
That took about 2 years. Credibled was created in 2020, but the first version worth selling came much later. Those years were paid for out of their own pockets, their evenings and a great many of their nights, tested inside Pure Staffing, rebuilt, and tested again. It was also before the current generation of AI tooling, so none of it was fast.
03What was at stake
Both of them had something to lose, and it was not the same thing.
Brad had a business he had run since 2003 and a reputation in an industry where everyone knows everyone.
Elvine had less to lose on paper and more in practice. He was still relatively new to the country, with no network to fall back on and no background in human resources. He had built enough businesses by then to know exactly what he was signing up for. Years of his life, his savings, and most of what people do outside work, spent on something that might still come to nothing.
Most startups fail. They both knew that going in.
04Still partners
None of it was smooth. Building a product from nothing. Learning an industry with real compliance obligations attached to it. Finding partners willing to take a small Canadian company seriously. Hiring. And doing all of it as 2 people with different instincts, deciding everything together.
A company can cost you your savings, your reputation, your career and most of your social life. It can also cost you a friendship. That was the one they were both most careful about.
TorontoStill partners, still friends.
They are still partners and still friends. Not because they agree on everything, but because each of them trusts the other to be right about the half he knows best.
Credibled has been bootstrapped from the start. It still is, and it is still Canadian owned.
02
Where it is now
Credibled is profitable and still owned by the 2 people who started it.
It runs checks for staffing agencies, for publicly traded companies, and for businesses with 5 employees. The decisions made at the start are still the decisions today. Pay per check, no subscription. Pay on results. And an account manager who knows your business, whether you need 5 checks a year or 5,000.
Credibled was ranked #21 on the FoundersPress Elevate 2025 list.
FoundersPress Elevate 2025Number 21 on the list.
Candidates and clients who want to see how their data is handled can read the Trust and Security Centre.
Brad founded Pure Staffing Solutions in 2003 and still runs it. He had never built software and had no intention of starting a technology company. He put his own money and 2 years into one anyway, because he had spent his career watching the same problem cost his clients time and money, and nobody had fixed it.
Pure Staffing has placed candidates for hundreds of clients, from small companies to Fortune 500s, and has been recognised on the Growth 500 and the Globe and Mail's Top Growing Companies list, along with multiple ACSESS awards. Brad has been nominated for EY Entrepreneur of the Year and for Canada's Top 40 Under 40, and served as an Executive Director on the ACSESS national board.
In 2017 he founded Bumsa, an outsourcing firm based in Chennai. He also hosts Steal From The Best, a podcast about what actually works in business.
Away from work he has spent years around competitive baseball, hockey and soccer in Toronto, most of it on the teams his 2 sons played for.
He was the customer before he was the founder, and it shows in the product. Credibled has features built for the way staffing agencies actually work. Smart Referrals turns a reference check into business development: the referees a candidate names are usually hiring managers, and they can tell you whether they are hiring or open to a move. Duplicate detection stops 2 recruiters ordering the same check twice. Both came from Brad knowing exactly where the money leaks and where it is left on the table.
It is used well beyond staffing. Transportation and logistics, technology, financial services, manufacturing, retail and consumer services, the gig economy, non-profits and startups all run checks through it.
Elvine is from Paris and has lived in Toronto since 2018. He has been building businesses since he was a teenager. The first was an event agency in Paris, run alongside his studies and sold when he left for Canada. Running it taught him operations under pressure, which is what events are, and what a business looks like when nothing goes to plan.
His first job in Canada was at Grapevine6, a Toronto software company, where he worked in product as it grew from 12 people to over 70 and was acquired by Seismic. Most of what he does on the product side of Credibled comes from that.
When Credibled started he knew nothing about recruitment. Learning it was the price of building the product, and it is why Credibled is built around what a recruiter actually does rather than what a screening company finds convenient.
On the floorElvine explaining the product, one conversation at a time.
He was named Young Entrepreneur of the Year at the Prix RelèveON 2026. He speaks and moderates panels on technology and security in Canada, and volunteers with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Toronto.
05
Why it works the way it does
01
It started with one check
The first thing Credibled did was reference checks, for businesses, and nothing else. Customers kept asking for the rest. Nobody wanted a separate tool and a separate invoice for criminal records, another for education, another for driving records. So it became one place to run all of them. MyCheck came later, for individuals who need a criminal record check of their own.
02
References travel badly
Traditional reference checking runs on phone calls. That works if everyone is in the same country. If a candidate's last manager is in Lagos, Manila or Lyon, nobody is getting up at 3am to make that call, and the candidate is the one who pays for it. Automating reference checks is not only faster. It decides whether a newcomer can be screened at all.
03
A commodity priced like a luxury
A criminal record check is a commodity. Same search, same source, whoever you buy it from. It was being sold like a luxury: prices that varied wildly between providers, fees that appeared later, and nobody able to tell you plainly what a check should cost.
2 decisions came out of that and both are still in the product. You pay on results, so a check that does not complete is not billed. And reference checks are priced per candidate rather than per referee, because what you need is to verify one person. 2 referees or 10, same price.
04
We paid for the first 2 years ourselves
Credibled has never raised outside money. The first 2 years of building were paid for by the founders, out of their own pockets, including the salaries of the team who built it. Revenue came after that, and everything since has been funded by customers who chose to pay. That is a harder test than a pitch meeting and a more honest one. It also means we only ever built what someone needed.
06
We still work the stand ourselves
Collision 2024, booth A611Both founders at the stand, with the product on screen behind them.
Neither of us has ever sent someone else to do this. If you talked to Credibled at Collision or at Elevate, you talked to one of the 2 people who built it.
Collision 2024 · Elevate Fest 2025
07
The logo that never shipped
This was the logo at the concept stage. A yellow star and a rounded typeface, made before either of us had settled on what the company was. It is worth showing anyway, because a company at this stage looks like this and almost nobody ever sees it.
