eLockr

Their pitch is 'eliminate endless verification calls from companies' — which works beautifully until Perplexity starts answering those verification questions directly from public data sources, no credential required. The locker survives; the reason to pay for it doesn't.

HR teams doing manual reference checks are already gone — Claude can verify employment history, cross-reference dates, and flag inconsistencies faster than any human can dial an extension. The verification workflow they built their business around is becoming a party trick.

There's real switching cost in the issuer relationships — once a university or corporation integrates their HRMS to auto-issue credentials, they don't switch lightly. But the verification side has zero lock-in: employers will use whatever's fastest and cheapest, which increasingly isn't a premium credential platform.

They launched 'Merit by eLockr' for gig worker verification and are actively blogging about DPDP compliance — signs they understand the verification landscape is shifting. But retrofitting a credentials platform for the AI era feels like adding a turbocharger to a horse-drawn carriage.

Employment verification survives; the question 'where should I store these credentials?' doesn't. AI eliminates the storage layer entirely by making verification instant and universal — why lock up data that's publicly discoverable anyway?