- Identiq, a Tel Aviv-based Anonymous Verification Network company, announced it raised $5 million in seed funding
- This round of funding was led by Entrée Capital
- Slow Ventures, Vertex Ventures Israel, and Oryzn Capital also participated in this round.
Tel Aviv, Israel-based Identiq has made a couple of big announcements this week. The company announced the launch of its Anonymous Verification Network, which enables companies to work together to fight fraud. And the company also announced a $5 million seed round of funding led by Entrée Capital. Slow Ventures, Vertex Ventures Israel, and Oryzn Capital also participated in this round.
How does it work? Identiq has launched a distributed network that allows members to positively validate new users and vouch for new ones that they already know without sharing any personal user data whatsoever. And identities can be verified at critical moments in the customer journey such as onboarding or first payment by making crucial connections between data points like email, phone, address, IP, device or funding source, etc.
This approach drives more accurate decisions, lower decline rates, reduces fraud, and brings a better user experience for consumers. Until now, existing solutions attempted to validate identity information using large databases of private and personal user information — which involves the risk of the data being shared without user consent or could have been potentially stolen. And companies using these centralized solutions must expose their own user data, thus putting them at risk of breach-by-proxy, disclosing trade secrets, and violating privacy regulations. Identiq does not collect, share, or store any user data.
Identiq’s FAIR (Fully Anonymous Identity Resolution) technology uses proprietary cryptographic protocols for obtaining validation from other network members while preserving complete consumer privacy. And this makes it fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations. And it is one of the first solutions designed for complementing the new sensitivities arising around such data privacy issues.
Identiq was founded by CEO Itay Levy, Uri Arad, and Ido Shilon last year. Levy previously founded a company called Appoxee and sold it to Teradata in 2015 along with being on the founding team of Buzzmetrics (acquired by Nielsen). Arad was previously the head of analytics and research in PayPal’s risk department. And Shilon was previously the head of the Israel-based R&D center for Nielsen.
