Car hire verification in London.
London runs the busiest independent hire scene in the country: prestige and everyday fleets booked over Instagram and WhatsApp, keys handed to hirers the operator has never met. The bookings are real; the paper trail usually is not. KeyProof puts the checks into the same chat the booking came from.
Private beta applications open, public launch January 2027The hirer pays their own £4.99 verification feeSet up with you by a founder
No firm has signed yet. KeyProof is choosing up to five UK hire firms for its private beta, set up and walked through their first real hire by a founder: request beta access.
KeyProof Ltd 17333773ICO ZC195906Own PI £1m + cyber £500k, Hiscox
What London operators deal with, and what fixes it.
- High-value cars, higher-value disappearances
- A London prestige fleet hands six figures of metal to strangers every weekend. When one car does not come back, the difference between a police case and a dead end is whether you verified who actually took it: photo ID matched to a selfie, not a name in a DM thread.
- ULEZ, congestion and PCNs land on the keeper
- In London the charges keep arriving weeks after the hire: ULEZ, the congestion charge, bus-lane and parking PCNs, all addressed to the registered keeper. Recharging them to the hirer needs a signed agreement naming a verified person with dates that match. Without one, the fines are simply yours.
- DM-first bookings with no paper trail
- Instagram is London's rental shopfront, and it is exactly where the paper trail dies. KeyProof does not fight that: the operator drops one link into the DM, and identity, licence, agreement, deposit and condition photos all happen inside the booking conversation the hirer already opened.
One link in the chat. One record per hire.
KeyProof works the same in London as everywhere in the UK, because it lives in the chat your bookings already use. The hirer opens one link and verifies their photo ID against a selfie, supplies the code for a DVLA licence check you complete and signs your agreement. At the car, you photograph its condition with the hirer there, and again at return. You get one timestamped record instead of a scattered thread: the full flow is on the product page. Every hire asks for more before the car moves: a six-shot condition set that has to be complete before the car is marked out (an override is written on the record), extra terms the hirer initials one by one, and a deposit on the record, with a higher default settable per car. How prestige fleets use it.
What every hire leaves behind
IdentityPhoto ID matched to a selfie
LicenceDVLA share code, for your own check on gov.uk
ConditionTimestamped photos, both ends
AgreementE-signed, sealed with a hash
DepositLogged, traceable to the hirer
London firms:
verify before the keys move.
One link in the chat, a checked licence, and a record with a name and a date range on it.
KeyProof is selecting UK car hire operators for its private beta, ahead of public launch in January 2027.