The Verified Startup badge
The Verified Startup badge — a shield icon shown right next to your startup's name wherever it appears — is Snikus's way of confirming that a real person actually controls the website that startup links to. It's a free, self-serve process, and it exists purely to give visitors (especially investors browsing Rankings or the Hall of Founders) one more concrete signal that they're looking at a real, operating company rather than a placeholder listing.
Before you start: you need a website set
Verification is tied to your startup's website field. If you haven't added one yet, do that first from Edit Startup — verification won't start without it.
How verification works, step by step
- Open your startup's settings and find the Verification section.
- Choose one of two proof methods: adding a small meta tag to your homepage's HTML `<head>`, or uploading a specific file to your site's root.
- Once either is in place, trigger the check from the same settings page.
- If we can fetch and confirm the proof, the shield badge appears on your startup immediately — no manual review wait.
If the check fails, the most common cause is the meta tag/file not actually being live yet (caching, a deploy that hasn't finished, or a typo in where it was placed) — double-check it's reachable directly in a browser before retrying.
What the badge unlocks
Beyond the trust signal itself, a Verified Startup badge adds a small fixed bonus to your startup's ranking score (see "How rankings work" in Rankings & Seasons) — on top of, not instead of, everything else your startup earns organically.
This is different from the personal blue tick
It's easy to conflate the two since both show as a badge, but they're unrelated systems:
- The Verified Startup shield is about your startup's website — free, ownership-based, tied to the startup itself.
- The blue tick (see "The blue tick" under Badges & Verification) is a personal, paid subscription badge on your own profile.
A founder can have either, both, or neither — getting one has no effect on the other.
Frequently asked
Does verification expire?
No — once verified, it stays verified unless the website field itself is later removed or changed to a domain you no longer control (in which case you'd need to re-verify the new one).
What if I don't have website access, only a teammate does?
Send them the exact meta tag or file from the verification screen — either proof method just needs someone with access to the site's files or CMS to place it.