About us

Hi, I'm Nate - Founder of Identity Abroad

Our Story

My family and I are from the San Francisco Bay Area where I spent my career in tech and entrepreneurship. In 2020 our personal and professional plans dovetailed in a way that let us realize a long-held ambition to live internationally - and we moved to Porto, Portugal.

Five years later, we were thrilled to reach the milestone of applying for Portuguese citizenship. We were a lot less thrilled about all the paperwork and bureaucracy that came with it.

Getting our FBI criminal background checks was just one of many hurdles we needed to clear, and we didn’t expect it to be as difficult from Portugal as it turned out to be. Providers were limited, the methods were antiquated and ink-based, and the whole process felt opaque and frustrating. To make matters worse, we’d struggled to get reliable fingerprints in the past, something we’ve since learned is more common than you might expect. More than 30% of our customers tell us the same.

We worried that if our prints were rejected by the FBI and we had to start the process over, it could delay our timeline and jeopardize our application.

Rather than leave it to chance, we decided to build a solution that would maximize our odds of getting it right the first time. We invested in the equipment, software, partnerships, and training, and it worked. We got our reports back and successfully submitted our citizenship applications in autumn 2025.

What began as a solution for ourselves quickly became something we could offer to friends and family, and ultimately grew into what Identity Abroad is today: a simple, trusted service for expats that just works when it comes to getting criminal background checks overseas.

If you have any questions feel free to send us a note at info@identityabroad.com, we're happy to help and we'd love to hear from you!

Cheers,

Nate, Sarah & Alinea