This installment of Funded in the Alley is presented by Bond Collective. Leading the way in hospitality and luxury offices space, Bond Collective designs workspaces to empower individuals and companies to be themselves. Rather than fit you into a limited, traditional office environment, Bond 60 Broad features larger 8-50+ person suites customized around your needs: privacy with access to community, concierge service, views of the Statue of Liberty, sound booths, and designer furnishings, just to name a few. Focus on your dream, and we’ll handle the rest.
With the number of online transactions growing daily, enterprises require the proper compliance and security measures to ensure that these transactions are genuine or face increasing liability. Socure is focused on digital identity verification using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Users have digital footprints and the company’s API allows seamless verification for banks, insurance providers and online lenders who need to be compliant and minimize fraud.
AlleyWatch spoke with CEO Sunil Madhu about the company and its most recent round of funding.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised a $13.9M Series B round from Commerce Ventures, Synchrony Financial, Flint, Workbench, Two Sigma, and Santander.
Tell us about your product or service.
Socure offers predictive analytics for digital identity verification as a service to businesses so they can accept more good customers without friction in addition to avoiding manual work and keeping fraud at bay.
What inspired you to start the company?
As an immigrant to the US who had credit history in the UK, I had to experience the hardship of having to build up credit history in the US from scratch when I moved here 16 years ago. Basically, I had to get into debt and pay off the debt in order to prove that I am real and that I’m not risky so that businesses in the US could accept me as a customer. My cofounder had a similar experience as an American millennial, who the credit bureaus treats as “thin file”. So, we started to explore the idea of using social and digital exhaust in combination with people’s off-line identity related data to be able to risk rate people’s digital identities.
How is it different?
Our single vendor solution offers real-time identity verification, correlation and prediction services for acceptance, fraud prevention, manual review elimination and KYC compliance all in a single, easy to use and quick to integrate API. Customers typical see an ROI over 10x with sufficient value to be able to rip and replace half-a-dozen legacy tools and point solutions from their technology stacks with Socure’s digital identity verification solutions. Socure’s predictive analytics and machine learning models are robust enough to meet bank-grade model governance and compliance requirements and they are 4x more accurate than competitive solutions in the market, offering the best coverage in the market as well.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
We are targeting the global digital identity verification market; a sub segment of Security and Governance Risk & compliance total available markets that exceed $90 Billion in size. We aim to serve businesses in 250 countries in Financial services, E-Commerce, Healthcare, Insurance, Telecom, Government, Education and IoT. We are helping 5 Billion people living on cash to gain financial acceptance at the institutions that use our solutions. Our focus for the next year is to expand market penetration in the US specifically in the financial services and ecommerce verticals.
What’s your business model?
We sell SaaS directly to large, medium and small enterprises and we sell indirectly to businesses through our OEM/white-label channel partner ecosystem including the world’s largest credit bureaus, various risk decision engine and integration platform providers, and core-banking and payments service providers.
How are you using machine learning to verify identity?
We train machines to differentiate between the online, social and offline characteristics of real, fake and synthetic (stolen and repurposed) identity as well as incidence of various types of fraud and manual review outcomes to help the machine go beyond human intuition for real-time identity verification.
What was the funding process like?
It was straight-forward given our steady revenue growth and customer success proof points.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Finding investors who were knowledgeable about our industry and the market opportunity.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Our growing list of Fortune 500 brand-name customers, our partnerships with the world’s largest bureaus and our 600% revenue growth rate.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Hitting our revenue milestones, accelerating infrastructure and operations growth and deepening market penetration in financial services and e-commerce verticals.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Hustle to get traction. Go lean until the business and revenue model is baked, and product market fit is accomplished to accomplish early scale.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Break-even + become a company worth over $100M in the next 12 months.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
11 Madison Park
This installment of Funded in the Alley is presented by Bond Collective. Leading the way in hospitality and luxury offices space, Bond Collective designs workspaces to empower individuals and companies to be themselves. Rather than fit you into a limited, traditional office environment, Bond 60 Broad features larger 8-50+ person suites customized around your needs: privacy with access to community, concierge service, views of the Statue of Liberty, sound booths, and designer furnishings, just to name a few. Focus on your dream, and we’ll handle the rest.
