Startup Profile: Onfido

  • Onfido is a London-based tech startup working in document verification and facial biometrics.
  • Husayn Kassai, Eamon Jubbawy and Ruhul Amin founded Onfido in 2012.
  • The company has raised a total of $200 million in funding from investors including TPG Growth, Microsoft, SBI Augmentum, Salesforce and Talis Capital.

 

 

About Onfido

 

Onfido’s founders, Husayn Kassai, Eamon Jubbawy and Ruhul Amin, are all former Oxford University students.  They felt that the current approach to background and security checks was unnecessarily manual and could be solved with the right technology. Their mission became bringing legal identities safely online through technology-backed verification around the world. Onfido was launched in 2012 with the help of Oxford’s startup incubator. 

 

OnFido-founders
CEO Husayn Kassai, COO Eamon Jubbawy, and CAS Ruhul Amin.

 

The startup now helps over 1,500 companies verify their users and has 306 employees, including 62 new hires in 2019. Onfido is working globally with offices in London, San Francisco, New York, Lisbon, Paris, New Delhi and Singapore.

 

 

How Does It Work?

 

Onfido aims to be the identity standard for the internet. The startup uses AI technology to analyse the validity of a user’s ID, such as a passport or driving licence. It can determine whether it is genuine and compares it against their facial biometrics to ensure that it belongs to them. The technology covers over 4,600 document types from 195 countries. This enables them to deliver fast and accurate authentication and allows for added layers security for ‘high-risk moments’, like account recovery and high-value transactions. Onfido provides this technology to companies including Revolut, Lendinvest and Bitstamp, allowing them to work with customers remotely and securely.

 

Onfido
Onfido uses AI technology and facial biometrics to ensure ID validity.

 

Demand for digital identity solutions is growing at scale, alongside the digital economy. With more and more online transactions taking place, digital identity is becoming an increasingly important player in preventing fraud. Onfido provides a deep understanding of technology to companies looking for these identity defences.

 

 

Onfido raises $100 million in funding

 

On the 15th April, Onfido announced that it had raised $100 million in a funding round led by TPG Growth, a firm that also backs Airbnb and Uber. This round brings the total raised by Onfido to $200 million, with its last series in 2019 raising $50 million. Onfido has not disclosed its valuation. 

 

The Onfido team.

 

 

The company says this funding will go towards expanding existing business globally, as well as introducing an alternative identity verification layer of the internet that would replace credit bureaus, Facebook logins and other established methods. Onfido has also discussed working on a new set of use cases that are more prevalent now amid the pandemic. These include virtual voting and passport or visa applications, as well as contact tracing. Contact tracing aims to track the spread of a virus without compromising users’ privacy. As the company expands its verification capabilities, the main aim remains the same in all use cases. As stated by CEO and co-founder Husayn Kassai: “Identity is broken and needs fixing”.

 

 

For more information see: https://onfido.com