Jumio raises $150m to grow its digital ID verification service

Digital ID provider Jumio secured $150m from private equity firm Great Hill Partners.

The firm plans to use its new cash for the development of its automated systems and grow its suite of anti-money laundering (AML) products. The RegTech firm is also planning to pump more resources toward expanding the reach of its Jumio KYX Platform.

With the current round, Jumio has now raised $205m from eight funding rounds. The fundraise represents “the single largest funding round in the digital identity space.” It added that the funding highlighted the global importance businesses are placing on the need to establish their customer’s digital identities to defend against fraud and other financial crimes as well as comply with Know Your Customer among other regulations.

Commenting on the funding, Jumio CEO Robert Prigge said, “Jumio’s innovations helped establish the identity verification market more than ten years ago, and the need to establish someone’s digital identity remotely has never been greater.”

Highlighting the firm’s future plans, Prigge said, “To further advance Jumio Go we will be adding additional fraud checks to ensure the ID is valid, as well as expanding coverage to include new countries and ID types.

“Our hybrid offering, which combines automated identity proofing plus human verification, already supports more than 4,000 ID types across 200 countries, so we’ll be advancing Jumio Go to match that more closely.”

The firm’s partners, Nick Cayer and Matt Vettel joined the Jumio board as part of the deal.

Cayer said, “Organisations must digitally transform their onboarding, KYC and AML monitoring processes, which have become even more vital as the volume of online and mobile payments reaches historic highs.”

Its digital ID verification service can authenticate documents such as passports and driving licenses and the ‘selfie + ID’ to establish people’s credentials online. In addition, its platform offers transaction monitoring and AML services to help businesses ensure they stay in compliance and protect against fraud.

The company has hardly had a smooth ride since it was launched in 2010. In early 2016, it was forced to go into bankruptcy due to “certain legacy issues combined with related government investigations and proceedings [which] made it difficult for Jumio to secure the necessary funding for its operations,” it said at the time.

However, it got out of bankruptcy the same year after it sold all its assets to Facebook Inc. co-founder Eduardo Saverin, an early investor in the company. Later that year it secured $15m in funding, proving that it was back in business.

Over the last year as more people do business transactions online, the company has been witnessing an upward graph, the firm claimed. Jumio added that it garnered “record results” in the previous year.

Boasting of servicing over 1,000 customers including banking group HSBC, United Airlines and the telecoms operator Singtel, it is active in 200 countries.

Last year it launched its Jumio Go offering, an automated version of its offering. Furthermore, it launched its new KYX Platform that collated data from a variety of sources to build a complete digital profile of users last September. Later that same month it also acquired Beam Solutions’ AML system for an undisclosed figure.

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