Identity verification platform for companies, Office, has added $4.5 million to its Series A, bringing its total to $16.5 million. Funding was obtained from GMO Venture Partners and GMO Payment Gateway. Other investors in the round include Quona Capital and Commerce Ventures.
Bureau has so far raised $20.5 million. In addition to its new financing, it also announced the acquisition of void.co an identity verification startup backed by Y Combinator, and entered into a strategic partnership with GMO Payment Gateway.
Founded in 2020, Bureau is headquartered in California, with teams in Dubai and India. He states that in the last 12 months, increased its customer numbers and revenue 6 times, with 300 million identities verified through its platform. Bureau helps companies prevent fraud and stay up to date with compliance regulations. Sectors served by Bureau include banking, fintech, insurance, the gig economy and real money gaming.
Before founding Bureau, co-founder and CEO Ranjan Reddy started mobile billing aggregator Qubecell, which was sold to mobile payments company Boku in 2013. Reddy was later chief commercial officer at Boku Identity, which was acquired by Twilio.
Reddy said Bureau's approach is to build a single source of truth, with its network of verified identities all tokenized behind a mobile phone number. Reddy explained that Bureau maps a digital person, including mobile phone numbers, emails, devices and IP, and also a physical identity based on document verification, OCR, Facematch, biometrics, information from government databases or database checks. data/AML. This generates contextual and tokenized information when someone opens an account, fulfills verification, logs into an app, or makes a transaction.
A network of Identity is built over time by combining digital personas, physical identity and behavior through link analysis. An identity's risk factor is then assessed based on how many links there are and what type, including indications of past fraudulent activity.
Some examples of how Bureau has been used are banks and neobanks to prevent “mule” accounts and the detection of synthetic IDs in contracting. Several lending companies are using Bureau's insights to lend to a larger base of new credit customers by assessing their risk profile more accurately. Some fintech organizations have used Bureau's anti-fraud software to detect account takeovers.
Reddy said one way Bureau differentiates itself from other identity management platforms is that it is not a data broker. Share decisions and not consumer data. He added that tokenized identities are part of Bureau's data privacy architecture.
Bureau's new funding will be used for additional investments in data and AI capabilities to automate its decisions, improving its efficiency and coverage. It also wants to expand its current coverage in 20 markets to more than 100 markets worldwide.
