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Security breaches, in which malicious hackers obtain fragments of information that are then used to impersonate individuals in order to gain access to confidential financial and confidential information of companies and businesses, have become commonplace in the world of digital services. More than 2.7 billion records were broken during a single incident this year in the United States and, overall, the damage caused by such incidents potentially reaches billions of dollars in the world.
Today, a start-up called Onfido, which uses artificial intelligence techniques combined with human verifiers to effectively verify the identity of users of digital services, today announces the provision of $ 50 million funding to help solve this constant and growing problem.
This funding follows a very strong growth of the start-up, which was founded in London but now operates most of its activities in San Francisco. In an interview, founder and CEO Husayn Kbadai said that more than half of his clients, and most of his new growth, came from the United States.
Onfido uses computer vision and a number of artificial intelligence-based technologies to check up on some 4,500 different types of identity documents, using techniques such as "liveness testing." "face," to detect patterns invisible to the human eye. in categories such as markets and communities, gaming and financial services, including companies such as Remitly, Zipcar and Europcar; and over the past year, sales have increased by 342%. Kbadai said he has so far verified "tens of millions" of identifiers.
The money – a C2 series, technically – comes from a group that includes leading strategic technology investors. The cycle is co-led by SoftBank Investment (SBI) and Salesforce Ventures. M12Capital (the new name of Microsoft Ventures), FinVC and other new and old anonymous investors also participate. This is a sign not only of how the largest companies in this industry are struggling with this problem, but also of the method they use to solve it.
Husayn Kbadai, founder and CEO, pointed out that the investment in SoftBank was separate from the Vision fund, but it should be noted that many of the companies that were removed, such as Didi, Uber, Oyo, Lemonade, etc. Basically, you trust people convinced that they manage their personal data securely, while carefully checking the providers of the platform (which means that they need and use services such as those of Onfido).
At the same time, Microsoft and Salesforce have large businesses that could reap multiple benefits from using an identity verification provider, not only for their own purposes, but as a service sold to their customers in the future. framework for broader identity management and security. offer.
The company does not reveal its valuation but has raised about $ 100 million so far and Kbadai has confirmed that it was a high plan, with "a lot of happy investors. "
"We have strong indicators and we have a long way to go for our growth," he added.
Many companies today offer services to help provide secure services to authenticate users, for example, to help them connect to their business accounts or access their online banking services. Onfido's activities focus on the first step of all of this – customer integration – specifically around consumer services.
The opportunity presented to her is the result of more than simply increasing the number of violations. Increasingly, there is a growing recognition that many of the existing services that were used for auditing are simply not adequate: they have also been violated – as in the case of some larger credit bureaus like Equifax – or are not. realistically, effective enough for the number of online services performed today, as in the case of face-to-face checks. Onfido says its system can perform a check in 15 seconds.
"The fraud is up and going nowhere," said Kbadai. "And the problem is that a dozen other companies have not done the work yet to detect it." No service is perfect, but Onfido says its "risk exposure" is 0 , 19%. to build its service over the AI means that the algorithms use each experiment to further refine its accuracy. "What we learn from a customer is applied everywhere," he notes.
"Companies have never had so much time gaining the trust of their customers by showing that they have a length of time ahead of fraudsters," said Frank van Veenendaal, former vice president. from Salesforce, who joins the board with this tour. "I think that Onfido has a unique opportunity to transform the digital identity market and provide authentication as a robust and scalable service, similar to the way Salesforce has transformed management." of the customer relationship. "
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