Are you really who you say you are? Being able to prove your identity is a perennial necessity that's even more crucial as digital spaces dominate more of our daily lives from shopping to banking.
One growing player in the field is San Francisco-based Incode — a startup that helps businesses authenticate their customers' identities via artificial intelligence. The company on Tuesday announced a $220 million Series B round at a valuation of $1.25 billion.
The round closed less than a year after its Series A, bringing the newly minted unicorn's total funding to $253 million. It was led by General Atlantic and SoftBank and also included J.P. Morgan, Capital One Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, SVCI and Uruguay-based fintech dLocal.
"We have created an experience that is so seamless and frictionless, it brings that ‘wow’ moment to the end customer when onboarding to a new bank, checking into a hotel or being admitted to a hospital,” CEO and founder Ricardo Amper said in a statement. “By reinventing these experiences, we are building trust and creating delight between enterprises and their customers."
Incode provides fully automated, omnichannel support for enterprise clients through its API and SDK. Its products can be used in on-premises configurations as well as through custom cloud applications or via SaaS options, too.
The company has dozens of products that businesses can pick and choose from. This includes services that can crosscheck and verify personal information like social security numbers and biometric data maintained by a government, such as the DMV in the U.S. or an electoral body like Mexico's National Electoral Institute, according to its website. It can also scan documents like utility bills as well as fingerprints.
Incode maintains its own databases of user-derived data to monitor for fraud, according to its website. One way it cuts down on fraud is recognizing whether or not a live person or a still photograph is in front of a user's smartphone camera — a process the company calls "liveness detection." This prevents people from using someone else's photograph to bypass a facial recognition check.
The company currently offers its services in five areas: finance, transportation, hospitality, ecommerce and age verification.
According to Bloomberg News, its clients include American Express, Citigroup, HSBC and Cornershop.
This latest funding "will allow us to expand geographically, to keep improving the product, and to work on our mission of building trust in societies" as it works towards a potential IPO, Amper told Reuters.
Incode was founded in 2015 as a photo sharing mobile app that could function even in regions with slow data capabilities. The company pivoted to identity verification after building up its own facial recognition technology software by using artificial intelligence, Amper told Forbes in June.
The company is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in Palo Alto and Mexico City, according to PitchBook.
It offers its services in seven countries — Mexico, the U.S., Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Canada and the UK — and intends to expand into Europe as well as Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai, according to various reports.
Incode joins a handful of S.F. identity tech firms that have made headlines this year. ForgeRock filed to go public in August and raised $275 million in its IPO in September, and Presidio Identity announced a $3.5 million round the same month. Meanwhile in October, OneLogin, a San Francisco-based provider of identity access management solutions that had raised $180 million, was acquired by Orange County-based One Identity.
