Identity management used to mean making sure you had a driver’s license when you left home, but today it’s not that easy: identity fundamentally underpins how we interact with the digital world, and identity services can take many forms (and, unfortunately, abuse). I’m excited to host a TechCrunch Live event with Persona co-founder and CEO Rick Song, one of the pioneers in this space, to discuss how his company sees ID management as an opportunity.
This TechCrunch Live event takes place on Wednesday, May 10, 2023 at 12:00pm PDT. register here For the Hopin interview, viewers can ask questions and connect with other attendees here.
Along with Rick, Index Venture’s Mark Goldberg also spoke at the event. Mark made the prescient move of discovering and backing Persona during its Series B round, and again backing the company’s $50 million Series C round.
Rick Song co-founded Persona with Charles Yeh in 2015, and as of Persona’s 2021 Series C funding round, the company was valued at $1.5 billion, according to PitchBook. Since its inception, the company’s goal has remained the same: to provide users with a verification system to protect their identities from theft and fraud. The company raised its Series B round in 2021 after seeing a 10x increase in revenue and a 5x increase in users. In late 2022, Persona launches new services, extending identity verification with the launch of a la carte tools, including a risk assessment engine, identity workflow tools, a graph database aimed at link analysis and fraud detection, and a marketplace of external developers to help bring their business tools to Connect to Persona’s identity tool.
I hope you will join this TechCrunch Live event. Rick and Mark will provide actionable insights on how companies can better protect users, and how founders creating such services can differentiate themselves from their competitors.
