Onfi CEO and co-founder Husayn Kassai (left) and Salesforce’s former Chief Sales Officer and Vice Chairman Frank van Veenendaal (right)
Onfido, a London-based identity verification service, announced it has raised $50 million in funding. Including this round, Onfido has raised over $100 million. This round of funding was led by SBI Investment and Salesforce Ventures. M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures), FinVC and several others also participated in this round.
“We’re seeing new data breaches occur every day, resulting in millions of people’s private data ending up on the dark web,” said Onfido CEO and co-founder Husayn Kassai in a statement. “With this new funding, we can protect more businesses, in more countries—and in more ways—from the effects of fraud. We’ll also be able to expand the reach of our technology, so that people without a credit history can finally access the online services they badly need.”
Acequia Capital, Tuesday Capital, Crane Venture Partners, Idinvest Partners, Augmentum Fintech plc, Wellington Partners, Plug & Play Venture Group, B&Y Venture Partners, CreditEase Ventures, TempoCap, and Talis Capital also participated in this round. And former Salesforce Chief Sales Officer and Vice Chairman Frank van Veenendaal is also joining Onfido’s board of directors.
“There has never been a more important time for companies to build trust with their customers by showing they are one step ahead of fraudsters,” added Frank van Veenendaal. “I believe Onfido has the unique opportunity to transform the digital identity market and deliver robust and scalable authentication-as-a-service, similar to how Salesforce transformed customer relationship management.”
With Onfido’s AI-powered identity verification, anyone will be able to access a host of online services in a matter of seconds from the biggest names in financial services, transportation, online marketplaces, gambling, etc.
Going forward, Onfido will be using AI to standardize the way businesses verify identities with scalability and security. And it will enable Onfido to consolidate its core market in the USA and accelerate its expansion into high-growth regions including Europe and Southeast Asia. Plus the company is going to advance its product development.
This round of funding also validates Onfido’s success in creating an award-winning AI-powered identity verification platform — which generated a 342% year-over-year sales growth and more than 1,500 customers worldwide. Some of the customers include Current, Drivy, DraftKings, Europcar, Indiegogo, Remitly, and Zipcar.
Onfido currently automates checks on more than 4,500 document types across 195 countries and detects anomalies automatically and uses human experts to verify outliers. So customer pass rates do not suffer as they grow or expand to more places. And when new documents are detected, Onfido’s AI quickly learns them and can continue handle high volumes without defaulting to manual operations.
Customers can be on-boarded to Onfido in 15 seconds, which minimizes drop-off rates while still complying with ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations. And cross-platform support, blur & glare detection, and custom UX design services contribute while helping ensure users do not drop-off during the process.
What about fraud prevention? Onfido’s risk engine protects the bottom lines of its customers with fraud exposure rates as little as 0.0195%.
“4.5 billion records were breached in the first half of 2018, and McKinsey has predicted the identity verification-as-a-service market to hit $20 Billion by 2022. So Onfido is very well placed to solidify its position as the global leader in identity verification,” explained SBI Investment executive officer Tomoyuki Nii. “We chose to invest in Onfido because they have proven their expertise at using artificial intelligence to effectively fight fraud, giving businesses a safe and secure way to scale their businesses online.”
