Founder & CEO
Tony spent years running two consulting firms that helped small businesses with their marketing — the second growing out of the first, and wound down cleanly during the pandemic. Across hundreds of those engagements he kept running into the same wall: owners were spending real money, and nobody could tell them whether it brought anyone through the door.
AI is what brought him back. Once anyone could produce an ad, the measurement gap stopped being an inconvenience and became the whole problem. VerifyLocal is his answer to it — built so that every result can be contested and independently replayed, rather than taken on trust.
PhD in System Engineering with neural network & optimization focus. Sole inventor on the provisional patent portfolio, with one jointly-invented application.
Acting CTO
Alex builds the engine underneath VerifyLocal — the database and core systems that turn signals from a storefront into a lift estimate and a confidence score.
A physicist and mathematician by training (B.S. Physics, B.A. Mathematics, Johns Hopkins), with graduate degrees from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Erasmus University Rotterdam. He came to local commerce from measurement science, which is the problem this company is actually solving.
He is a named co-inventor on VerifyLocal's settlement-layer patent filing.
Founding Engineer & Head of Platform
Taegan built what you're looking at. He owns VerifyLocal's creator, business, and admin dashboards, the design system, and the frontend — and architects the platform's integrations across Google Places, Twilio, and the AI inference stack.
He is a named co-inventor on VerifyLocal's settlement-layer patent filing.
Lucas Draghi
Lead of Production & Marketplace Manager
Lucas is the person our creators actually talk to. He recruits them, briefs them, and runs every campaign from the shoot to the boost — across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
A New York Film Academy graduate and working videographer and photographer, he came up making commercial content at volume, including social and video production for a top-selling Whatnot seller. He knows what a good local video looks like and how fast it has to come together.
He also owns VerifyLocal's visual identity — the brand, the storytelling, and the public face of the product.
Alan Hong
Head of Infrastructure & AI Agents
Alan keeps VerifyLocal running and builds the agents you talk to. He owns the servers, the deployment pipeline, and the codebase — and he built the AI agent system that helps business owners work out what campaign to run and what to say in it.
He also built the data layer underneath the platform: the pipeline that finds and structures the business and creator records the marketplace runs on.
Fifteen years working alongside our founder — the longest-standing partnership on the team.
Investor inquiries: Tony. Engineering & technology: Alex.