Identity verification startup Onfido announced on Wednesday it has secured a financing of $100 million from its latest round led by global investment firm TPG Growth. The funding, which was Onfidos’ biggest to date, brings the startup’s total fundraising to $200 million.
According to a report from Tech Crunch, the fresh funds will be used by Onfido in three ways: first, to finance the startup’s global expansion; second, to boost its AI-driven technology for alternative identity verification; and third, to work up on more cloud-based identity verification tools that will provide relative convenience and security to people amid the pandemic.
"Over the coming years, we'll all be able to use our real identity to seamlessly access everything from financial services, online healthcare, and trust marketplaces, to self-check-ins at airports, hotels, and car rentals," Husayn Kassai, CEO and co-founder, said in a statement.
"Passwords will become a thing of the past as a method for accessing digital services, as will queuing for hours to vote in person. We're standardizing the way everyone proves their real identity, in a similar way to how Facebook has standardized the way everyone shares their social identity, and LinkedIn has standardized the way everyone signals their professional identity."
Founded in 2012, Onfido operates as a provider of cloud-based identity verification technologies. Specifically, it is most famous for its software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that uses artificial intelligence to perform background checks on people, which include assessing facial biometrics, checking of criminal records, doing blur and glare detection, and many more.
To date, the London-based company houses around 400 employees across seven countries. The number of its existing customers also score to around 1,500, which includes CLEAR, Revolut and Expensify.
According to Onfido, with physical interactions now restricted due to COVID-19 pandemic, fast and secure ID verification emerges to become critically important – a feature, which the startup seeks to provide.
In a statement, Mike Zappert, partner of TPG Growth, expressed his delight with the new partnership, saying that Onfido’s use of Al to power innovations is “extraordinary.”
“There is enormous demand for secure and simple identity verification and authentication across major sectors and we see Onfido becoming the new standard for digital access. Their team has done a remarkable job in a relatively short period of time, and we look forward to partnering with them to continue their momentum into new use cases and geographies,” he added.
