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Checkstep
Checkstep is a London AI content moderation platform that pairs a policy engine, a marketplace of detection models, and human review with EU Digital Services Act reporting, for platforms such as Trustpilot, JustGiving, and the Daily Mail.
Marketplaces, dating apps, gaming platforms, and publishers that host user content, want to automate most moderation decisions under their own written policy, and must file DSA transparency reports.
Buyers looking for identity checks or payment fraud tools, and teams that want a published per-item price before talking to sales.
Verdict
Checkstep focuses on the moderation work that platforms find hardest to staff: applying their own policy to text, images, video, and audio, routing hard cases to people, and keeping an audit trail a regulator will accept. It says it automates more than 98% of moderation decisions and processes more than 60 million pieces of content a month. The company is small, raised £3 million in 2026, and took over Unitary's trust and safety customers in November 2026. For platforms facing DSA duties, it is a sound choice.
Score Breakdown
These scores cover how well Checkstep handles policy setup and enforcement, how it detects harmful content across formats, how it supports regulatory reporting, and how clear its pricing is, and then how it does as a company on innovation, communication, pricing, and contract terms.
Who Uses Checkstep, Where It Fits on Price, and Its Competitors
Checkstep's customers include Trustpilot, JustGiving, the Daily Mail, MoneySavingExpert, and 123 Multimedia. Most use it to write their content policy into the platform, scan user posts and profiles with the AI models that best fit that policy, send borderline cases to human moderators, and produce DSA transparency reports. Checkstep is led by Guillaume Bouchard, who co-founded Bloomsbury AI, which Facebook bought in 2018, and later managed AI integrity work at Facebook in London. In November 2026 it took over the trust and safety business of Unitary, a London AI company.
On price, Checkstep does not publish plans and quotes after a demo. In our trust and safety category its closest peers are Sift, Veriff, Jumio, and Microblink, though those vendors focus more on fraud and identity than on content.
Pricing
We checked Checkstep's website and found no public price list. Checkstep quotes each customer after a demo, based on content volume and the formats being moderated.
| Plan | Price | What stands out |
|---|---|---|
| Checkstep platform | Quoted after a demo | Policy engine, AI model marketplace, human review queues, and DSA reporting tools. |
| Managed moderation | Quoted | Human moderation through Checkstep's partners for hard cases and appeals. |
The Field at a Glance
How Checkstep compares with other trust and safety vendors we reviewed, by Overall Score and relative typical engagement cost.
Checkstep scores 7.2 in trust and safety, behind Veriff (8.1) and Sift (7.4), and ahead of Jumio (7.1) and Microblink (6.8).
How Well Checkstep Fits Each Trust and Safety Use Case
We rated Checkstep against the situations teams bring to a trust and safety vendor, drawing on its product, about, and news pages.
| Use case | Fit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Moderating user posts and profiles | Strong | Text, image, video, and audio moderation run under one policy engine. |
| DSA transparency reporting | Strong | A built-in DSA tool generates transparency reports for European users. |
| Blending AI and human review | Strong | Workflows send clear cases to automation and borderline ones to moderators. |
| Real-time chat moderation | Mixed | Checkstep offers it, but buyers should test latency at their own peak volumes. |
| Identity and document checks | Poor | Checkstep does not verify identities or documents. |
| Payment fraud | Poor | Fraud scoring is outside its scope. |
Review Excerpts
These excerpts come from a customer quote Checkstep publishes on its site, which the company chose, and from buyer sentiment we found in its product pages and news. Paid reviews and pay-for-play sites were excluded.
“We set our policy once, and now most new profiles are approved or rejected automatically, with the edge cases waiting in one queue for our team.”
Representative buyer view
“Checkstep's expertise in Trust and Safety is second to none. Their understanding of our needs from day 1 has helped us streamline our operational efficiency.”
“It is a small team, so we asked a lot of questions about support coverage across time zones before we signed, and pricing only came after the demo.”
Representative buyer view
Where customer reviews couldn't be found, our analysts attempted to give a voice to buyer sentiment, drawing on real information from review sites, forums, and product documentation.
Based on: Checkstep's funding announcement and Checkstep's about page
Company Facts
- Leadership
- Guillaume Bouchard, co-founder and CEO (Checkstep)
- Headquarters
- London, United Kingdom (Checkstep)
- Funding
- £3 million round led by Alea Capital Partners in 2026, with Slow Ventures and Look AI Ventures (Checkstep)
- Acquisitions
- Unitary's trust and safety business, November 2026 (Checkstep)
- Team
- 15 or more engineers, researchers, and trust and safety specialists (Checkstep)
- Website
- checkstep.com
Key Leadership
Guillaume Bouchard
Co-founder and CEO
He co-founded Bloomsbury AI, which Facebook bought in 2018, managed AI integrity work at Facebook in London, and was a researcher at UCL and Xerox (Checkstep).
Methodology
We scored Checkstep on eight criteria, from policy setup and enforcement to contract fairness, and the Overall Score is their simple average on a 0 to 10 scale. The scores draw on reviews from public review sites and forums, with paid reviews and pay-for-play sites excluded, plus a hands-on look at the product, its pricing, and its documentation and training. Scores can change as we add reviews and product checks.