Brazilian identity verification and background check company idwall, which offers onboarding with selfie biometrics, has raised $38m in Series C funding.
The funding round was led by Endurance, with participation from GGV Capital, monashees, Canary, Qualcomm Ventures, ONEVC, Peninsula and Norte. The company’s total fundraise comes to nearly $50m to date.
The company plans to spend some of its cash recruiting developers, as well as building out its existing products and launching new ones. The company expects to grow by 100 to a team of 300 over the next few months. The company is also examining the possibility of expanding outside of Brazil to all of Latin America.
The security firm aims to combat online fraud and identity theft – a problem that has been exacerbated with increased online transactions amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
In specific, Brazilian companies lose circa $41bn due to fraud – a figure which is increasing every year. As a result, Lincoln Ando and Raphael Melo started idwall in 2016 as an automated background check solution. Since then, it has grown into a suite of data and identity validation and risk analysis products. Its MeuID app is aimed at users who want to change the way they identify themselves and share their data.
Idwall uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate background checks, risk analysis ID validation and optical character recognition (OCR). The software runs checks against public and private databases and helps customers meet compliance requirements, returning results in less than three minutes.
Over the years, idwall has generated more than 65 million data reports for its clients, a number that it says surged by 5,000 times between 2017 and 2020. Those reports have helped its clients scale their operations, register more of their own clients and optimize compliance and KYC processes, as well as reduce fraud.
With 300 clients including two of Brazil’s three biggest banks, idwall services companies such as iFood, Claro, Cielo, Loggi, Ebanx, QuintoAndar and OLX among others. The firm saw its revenue from clients in the financial industry alone climb by 588% compared to 2019. The company says it has grown 1,458% between 2017 and 2020, with average growth of 144% per year.
Ando said, “The more digitised companies become, the more client expectations grow — and market competition grows stronger. Our mission is to always stay ahead of innovation in our market, and that’s why we invest so much in growth and in building the best possible team to develop our products.”
Echoing a similar sentiment, GGV Capital Managing Partner Hans Tung said, “idwall is leading the discussions and innovations in Brazil regarding digital onboarding and identity validation. And their B2C digital identity app MeuID could be the first true super-app in Latin America.”
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