Identity verification platform for businesses, Bureau, has added $4.5 million in its Series A, bringing its total to $16.5 million. The funding was raised from GMO Venture Partners and GMO Payment Gateway. Other investors in the round include Quona Capital and Commerce Ventures.
Bureau has now raised $20.5 million to date. In addition to its new funding, it also announced the acquisition of inVOID, a Y Combinator-backed identity verification startup, and entered a strategic partnership with GMO Payment Gateway.
Founded in 2020, Bureau is headquartered in California, with teams in Dubai and India. It claims that over the last 12 months, it increased its customer and revenue numbers 6x, with 300 million identities verified through its platform. Bureau helps companies prevent fraud and keep in step with compliance regulations. Sectors served by Bureau include banking, fintech, insurance, the gig economy and real money gaming.
Before founding Bureau, co-founder and CEO Ranjan Reddy started mobile billing aggregator Qubecell, which was sold to mobile payments company Boku in 2013. Reddy then served as chief business officer at Boku Identity, which was acquired by Twilio.
Bureau founder Ranjan Reddy
Reddy said Bureau’s approach is build a single source of truth, with its network of verified identities, all tokenized behind a mobile number. Reddy explained that Bureau maps out a digital person, including mobile numbers, emails, devices and IPs, and also a physical identity based on document verification, OCR, Facematch, biometric, info from government databases or database/AML checks. This generates contextual, tokenized insights when someone opens an account, performs compliance for verification, logs onto an app or make a transaction.
An identity network is built up over time by combining digital persons, physical identity and behavior using link analysis. The risk factor of an identity is then assessed based on how many links there are and what type, including indications of past fraudulent activities.
Some examples of how Bureau has been used is by banks and neobanks to prevent mule accounts and synthetic ID detection at onboarding. Several lending companies are using Bureau’s insights to lend to a larger base of new-to-credit customers by evaluating their risk profile more accurately. Some fintech organizations have use Bureau’s anti-fraud software to detect account takeover.
Reddy said one way Bureau differentiates from other identity management platforms is that it is not a data broker. It shares decisions and not consumer data. He added that tokenized identities are part of Bureau’s data privacy architecture.
Bureau’s new funding will be used in additional investments in data and AI capabilities to automate its decisions, improving their efficiency and coverage. It also wants to expand its current coverage in 20 markets to more than 100 markets around the world.
Originally published at techcrunch.com