If you've ever had to notarize a document, it can be a bit of a pain. Living near a UPS store makes it easier, but if you're a person who shops on Amazon and uses email more than the US mail, you might find yourself wondering, "What am I doing here?" "Why can't we do this online?" and "Damn that's a lot of bubble wrap."
Pat Kinsel was wondering these things--but not while standing in a UPS Store. He founded Notarize from his couch, where he was laid up with a broken leg after a skiing accident that put 16 metal pins in his knee. Notarize, a digital notary service that launches Thursday on the Apple App Store, is a dba. The company behind it is called (you guessed it) 16 Pins. Backers of its $2.4 million seed round include Polaris Partners in Boston, Ludlow Ventures in Detroit, Crashlytics co-founders Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert, and Streetwise Media co-founder Chase Garbarino.
Kinsel was one of the founders of Spindle, a location-based social news filter started by a bunch of veterans of Microsoft's FUSE Labs and Startup Labs--skunkworks idea incubators Redmond ran at its Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge. Spindle sold to Twitter in 2013 in what we heard at the time was an acqui-hire.
In exchange, Kinsel and his collaborators got stock in Twitter, which would go public later that year at an IPO-day market cap of $25 billion. It closed at $11B, Wednesday, but at the time Kinsel was pleased. He signed the papers in front of a notary, put them in an overnight envelope and went on vacation. As it turned out, the notary made a mistake, and Kinsel couldn't claim his shares for a matter of weeks. Which was fine in the end, but it got Kinsel thinking about notaries.
Kinsel left Twitter the following April to join Polaris Partners as a venture partner. Then, on a New Year's ski trip in Idaho, he broke his leg badly, requiring surgery to rebuild his knee. "I spent about 3 months on the couch and just did a ton of research," he told me.
In a news release due out Thursday, Notarize pegs the market for notarizations at $30 billion annually. That's based on a study by the National Notary Association a few years ago that found 1 billion to 1.25 billion notary transactions a year--but nobody actually knows how many there are. Outside of the UPS store, there's a frontier kind of quality to the notary business. Just a man (or a woman) with a big metal stamp and a book. And sometimes a car.
"The idea is to elevate the profession of notarization," Kinsel told me. Based in Boston, Notarize takes advantage of a law passed by the state of Virginia, allowing notaries to handle transactions online, verifying signature and identification over video chat. Each notary transaction costs $25, a price set by law in Virginia.
You'd be surprised how cheap the domain, notarize.com, was to buy, Kinsel said. "Notarize" wasn't claimed on the Apple App Store.
Security is based on X.509 encryption and it's compliant with standards set by the US General Services Administration (GSA), Kinsel said.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story had Notarize's estimate of the notary public market at $3 billion. It's $30 billion.
