ID verification firm Socure so cool with $30m funding
Socure is the latest identity verification and fraud prevention innovator to attract the interest of – and big investment from – fintech’s venture capital community, reports David Penn at Finovate.
Looking for growth in US market
The New York City-based company has scored $30 million in new funding in a round led by Scale Venture Partners.
“This funding will enable us to grow our footprint in new strategic US market sectors that are in need of accurate, automated identity verification technology, including healthcare and the public sector,” Socure CEO Tom Thimot says. “We will invest in the talent required to continue innovating and expanding our machine learning-based predictive analytics platform.”
The round also featured participation from Commerce Ventures, Flint Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, Synchrony, and Sorenson Capital. The Series C round takes the company’s total funding to $57.5 million.
Socure’s platform leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning techniques to analyse trusted on- and offline data from email, phone, IP, physical address, social media and the Internet, and provide real-time authentication.
The technology helps drive financial inclusion, boosting acceptance rates for millennials and other thin-file applicants by as much as 40%.
Socure’s platform also supports CIP/KYC programmes and AML compliance, lowering fraud by up to 80% and cutting manual review costs by up to 90%.
“Companies from banks to insurance carriers to healthcare providers struggle with just how slow, expensive, and inaccurate today’s identity verification services can be,” Scale Venture Partners’ Rory O’Driscoll says. “Socure offers them better accuracy and fraud detection, delivered through an easy-to-implement API connection.”
O’Driscoll, who will join the company’s board of directors as part of the investment, called Socure’s technology “a compelling proposition (that) explains why this company has been so successful so fast”.
Socure finished 2018 with 3x gains in annual revenue and more than 100 deployments with leading banks, lenders, and payment providers.
