Having secured $17.5m in additional funds from investors like Coatue Management and First Round Capital, Persona is now looking to develop its solutions and grow its team.
CEO Rick Song co-founded the identity verification startup together with Charles Yeh in 2015 to meet the cybersecurity and customer verification demands created by modern financial companies. The co-founders aim to continue this with the backing from the new Series A round.
“With all transactions going online, internet identity requires more than a one-size-fits-all approach, especially with deep fakes and synthetic identity fraud on the rise,” argued Song. “Persona’s customisable, secure and easy to use approach is also the first identity platform that prioritises our customers, treating people like people, not user IDs.”
His argument is that the need for this product has only grown in tandem with the increase in the number of huge hacks exposing millions of customers’ private data. The Capital One hack in July 2019 that exposed 106 million customers’ information was only the latest in a long line of breaches.
“Persona protects customers from liability. We only give them the PII data they need to conduct business, thus reducing data breaches,” said Song. “While we take pride in treating users like humans, we’ve eliminated human touch within the identity verification process, which increases security by granting access to only those that need it, while increasing speed through automation.”
Petal, the FinTech credit company, is one of Persona’s clients.
“Persona integrates in days compared to months and provides the flexibility to pivot to any use case while providing a clean and easy experience for our customers,” said Alex Constantino, fraud manager at Petal. “Persona does a great job of enabling us to address know your customer requirements, while at the same time helping us to oversee the associated data management responsibilities.”
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