Digital ID verification start-up OCR Labs expands to North America with $30m funding
Digital ID verification provider OCR Labs has announced a $30 million Series B round led by New York-based Equable Capital.
OCR Labs has raised $46m through its combined Series A and B
OCR Labs has raised $46 million through its combined Series A (held last year) and B. Previous investors include OYAK and Halkin Ventures.
The new funds will be used to expand its team in North America and EMEA, the start-up says. It is opening a new office in the US and hiring a direct sales force there, and also recruiting a global chief revenue officer.
Built on proprietary technology, OCR Labs’ solution supports anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) regulations, improves customer identity verification, and reduces fraud.
Its proprietary technology is an accredited, biometric solution that combines optical character recognition (OCR), document fraud assessment, liveness detection, video fraud assessment, and face matching.
“2021 was an incredible year for OCR Labs,” comments CEO John Myers. The start-up saw a 500% increase in new clients.
It has also doubled its growth rate every year in the last three years.
“Our vision remains unchanged: we strive to be the leading technology provider of digital identity verification, globally,” Myers states.
OCR Labs saw a 500% increase in new clients in 2021
OCR Labs supports clients across industries including financial services, government, telco, crypto, and a variety of platform-based businesses, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. Customers include the Australian Government, Vodafone, ZIP, and BMW.
Alain Meier, co-founder and CEO of Cognito (a California-based provider of compliance and anti-fraud data solutions), a customer of OCR Labs, describes the vendor as “extremely nimble” and says its solution helps “to verify users that other systems struggle with”.
OCR Labs was founded in 2016 by Matthew Adams and Daniel Aiello in Sydney, Australia and launched its first product in 2018. It has since moved its HQ to London, UK, and opened an office in Turkey.
It claims to be “the only provider with unique deep learning engines that allows it to control the entire identity verification flow without human intervention”.
The founders invested in developing this technology after identifying issues in the market that included the use of document templates and higher error rates with different skin tones from existing solutions, the company explains.
