Berbix, an instant identity verification platform founded by former Airbnb Trust and Safety team members, announced a $9 million Series A round of financing led by Mayfield, with participation from existing investors including Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and Fika Ventures. Patrick Salyer, Mayfield partner, joins the board, with the capital being earmarked for team and customer growth.
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“The need for an instant identity verification system has grown in urgency as digital transformation has fast forwarded a decade in our post-COVID world,” said Steve Kirkham, co-founder and CEO of Berbix. “Growth has continued to exceed our expectations during the COVID-19 pandemic. This time last year, we processed the same number of verifications in a month that we do daily today. The inability to conduct traditional identity checks in person has forced organizations to move online for innumerable use cases. One example is the Family Independence Initiative, a non-profit that trusts and invests in families’ own efforts to escape poverty. Our software has enabled them to eliminate fraudulent applications and focus on the families who have been economically affected by COVID.”
According to a 2018 study by McKinsey, the market for ID verification-as-a-service will grow from $10 billion in 2017 to between $16 billion and $20 billion in 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the trend toward social isolation and it is more critical than ever to have a fully digital way to prove our identities. Existing solutions are typically image-based and rely on humans for subject comparison, document authenticity and data validation. Given advances in machine learning, cell phone technology and other innovations, software can now detect fake IDs and other types of fraud more quickly, cheaply, and effectively than the best human screener.
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The Berbix team set out to create an ID verification solution that could replace existing methods with technology that does the job faster, more effectively and securely, and that ultimately increases trust and safety. Berbix uses sophisticated machine learning techniques to instantly spot fraud that no human eye could detect. The solution includes an optional “liveness” check, which requires people to react to specific instructions. This ensures that a real person is present instead of a photo of that person. Berbix moves beyond the slow manual review process and error-prone automated solutions that simply extract data from an identity document, to validate IDs in 2 seconds or less.
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