Onfido, an 8 year-old identity verification company, on Wednesday a new $100 million funding round it will use to advance its AI-driven technology. The company verifies the authenticity of a person’s photo ID by using AI to match it against selfie video.
The new funding round is led by global investment firm TPG Growth and brings Onfido’s total fundraising to $200 million.
Onfido’s technology, the company argues, is especially compelling amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as essential services become more digitized and ID verification becomes critically important. In recent weeks, Onfido has seen increased business in areas like online healthcare, remittance and payments, and paid and volunteer worker verifications needed to help with relief
Efforts.
For instance, Onfido partnered with Florence, a staffing firm that supplies registered nurses, to bring care workers and volunteers into the homes of COVID-19 patients. In the category of online healthcare and pharmacies, Onfido says it has seen a 4X weekly demand increase.
At the same time, Onfido’s leaders put forward a vision of its authentication technology as a near-ubiquitous standard for identity verification.
“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,” CEO and co-founder Husayn Kassai 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 now has around 400 employees across seven countries. It has around 1,500 customers and reported 130 percent year-over-year growth in 2019. Its customers include CLEAR, Revolut and Expensify. Some of its partners in the identity space include ForgeRock, SecureKey Technologies and Okta.
Along with TPG Growth, the company is backed by Salesforce Ventures, M12 (Microsoft) Ventures and others. It plans to use its new funding to ramp up investment in machine learning, to consolidate existing markets and to service demand in new geographies.
