Enterprise Identity Verification Platform, Bureau, added $4.5 million to its Series C funding round, bringing its total to $12 million. The funding was raised by GMO Venture Partners and GMO Payment Gateway. Other investors in the round include Quona Capital, Commerce Ventures and Okta Ventures.
To date, the Bureau has raised $20.5 million.In addition to the new financing, it announced the acquisition of invalidis a Y Combinator-backed identity verification startup with a strategic partnership with GMO Payment Gateway.
Founded in 2020, Bureau is headquartered in Singapore and California, with teams in Dubai and India. The company claims to have increased its number of customers and revenue sixfold over the past 12 months, with 300 million identities verified through its platform. Bureau helps companies prevent fraud and comply with compliance regulations. Industries served by Bureau include banking, fintech, insurance, 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 then served as Chief Commercial Officer for Boku Identity, a mobile payments company. Acquired by Twilio.
bureau founder ranjan reddy
The Bureau’s approach, Reddy said, is to build a single source of truth for its network of verified identities, all tokenized by mobile phone numbers. Reddy explained that the Bureau maps a digital human, including mobile numbers, emails, devices, and IPs, along with physical identities based on document verification, OCR, Facematch, biometrics, government database information, or database/AML checks. This generates contextual, tokenized insights when someone opens an account, performs compliance verification, logs into an application, or makes a transaction.
Identity networks were built over time by combining digital people, physical identities, and behaviors using link analysis. The identity’s risk factors are then assessed based on the number and type of links, including signs of past fraudulent activity.
Some examples of how banks and neobanks are using Bureau are to prevent mule accounts and synthetic ID detection on onboarding. Some lenders are using Bureau’s insights to extend loans to a wider range of new credit customers by more accurately assessing their risk profile. Some fintech organizations already use Bureau’s anti-fraud software to detect account takeover.
Reddy said one of the things that sets Bureau apart from other identity management platforms is that it’s not a data broker. It shares decisions rather than consumer data. Tokenized identities are part of the bureau’s data privacy architecture, he added.
The bureau’s new funding will be used to make additional investments in data and artificial intelligence capabilities to automate decision-making and improve efficiency and reach. It also hopes to expand its current coverage in 20 Asian markets to more than 100 globally.
