Fama Technologies

Fama Technologies: AI-Powered Social Media Background Screening

Fama Technologies provides AI-powered online screening that analyzes candidates' and employees' public social media and online presence for workplace-relevant behavioral risk. The company was founded in 2015 in Los Angeles by CEO Ben Mones, who has said he started Fama after dealing with a workplace misconduct issue as a manager that could have been prevented with pre-hire screening of the employee's publicly available online information (Inspiring Workplaces, 2026). Fama has raised more than $30 million in funding, including a $10 million Series B round in February 2022 led by Silverton Partners (Fama press releases; Business Wire, 2022). In April 2023, Fama acquired Social Intelligence, one of the earliest entrants in the social media screening space, which had worked with the FTC in 2011 to help establish the compliance framework the industry still operates under (PRWeb, April 2026). In April 2026, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Fama a foundational patent covering its core social media screening technology, with a priority date back to November 2015 (PRWeb, April 2026).

What Fama does

Fama's AI platform analyzes text, images, and video across a candidate's or employee's public online and social media presence to surface behavior signals relevant to workplace risk, bigotry, illegal drug references, discriminatory behavior, or other custom risk criteria an employer defines, and can be configured to match a specific company's code of conduct (PRWeb, 2026). The platform is built to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), GDPR, and emerging AI privacy frameworks. Fama reports it now serves more than 3,600 customers and has run 45 million online and social media background checks, supporting the majority of the global background screening industry, including partnerships with Sterling, HireRight, and First Advantage (Inspiring Workplaces, 2026).

Where it fits

Fama serves employers directly as well as background screening firms, applicant tracking systems, and executive search firms that resell or integrate Fama's screening into their own products (Business Wire, 2022). It's a fit for organizations that want structured, compliance-first social media screening as part of hiring or executive due diligence, rather than ad hoc manual searches by recruiters or hiring managers.

Why this matters for people leaders

Social media screening sits in genuinely contested territory: it can surface real workplace risk before a bad hire happens, but it also raises legitimate concerns about privacy, consistency, and the potential for bias if screening isn't applied uniformly and compliantly across candidates. Fama's emphasis on FCRA and GDPR compliance, and its acquisition of one of the sector's original compliance-focused players, reflects an awareness of that tension rather than treating screening as a purely technical problem. For organizations focused on Culture, Performance, and Retention, the deciding question is less whether to screen and more whether the screening process is applied consistently, transparently, and lawfully, since inconsistent application is where both legal exposure and cultural harm tend to originate.

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