Socure, the startup that helps companies verify users’ identities, is valued at $1.3bn after a massive $100m funding round.
The Series D round was led by venture capital firm Accel, alongside other investors including Citi Ventures, a unit of Citigroup Inc., Commerce Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, a unit of Wells Fargo & Co, among others.
While Socure has been focused on the financial services industry, it intends to use the funds for expansion across every consumer-facing verticals including online gaming, healthcare, telco, e-commerce and on-demand services. Furthermore, it intends to accelerate product innovation as its patent portfolio grows and hire more talent.
Socure’s predictive analytics platform uses AI and ML along with digital and offline data intelligence from email, phone, address, IP, device, velocity and the broader internet to verify identities in real-time. Its identity management products can help businesses achieve know-your-customer auto-approval rates of up to 97%, it added.
Having raised a total of $196m to date including the $35m round in August 2020, the valuation is a significant increase from last year when Socure was worth $360m. The reason for growth can be attributed to the growth in the identity-verification industry as companies increasingly seek to crack down on cyber fraud, it said.
Commenting on the firm’s growth, Socure co-founder and CEO Johnny Ayers said, “We are now more confident than ever that we will be the first company to eliminate identity fraud while unlocking complete and fully-automated coverage of every good ID.”
Furthermore, Socure is on track for annual recurring revenue that exceeds $100m this year and plans to go public by 2023, Ayers said.
In conjunction with the funding, the New York-based company said Accel Partner Amit Jhawar, former general manager of Venmo, will join Socure’s board of directors. “The COVID-19 year accelerated our global shift to a digital-first economy and with that came security challenges,” Jhawar said. “The Socure team accurately predicted the immediate need for identity verification solutions in industries like banking and fintech, and we’re excited by the tremendous opportunity as Socure expands to support new industries.”
The firm boasts of servicing over 350 customers, three top-five banks, six top-10 card issuers and more than 75 of the biggest FinTechs including Varo Money, Public, Chime and Stash. Given that the digital identity market is expected to be worth $30bn by 2023 from just under $15bn in 2019, according to One World Identity, the space is indeed ripe for more startups to become unicorns.
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