A new fintech venture born from a Northern Virginia consulting firm is laying groundwork to speed up growth of its digital payment platform — armed with a fresh $10 million.
McLean-based Verituity, whose platform aims to streamline and modernize treasury services for banks and their customers, has closed a Series A round led by ForgePoint Capital and Ardent Venture Partners, Verituity President and CEO Ben Turner told us Monday. Don Dixon, managing director at ForgePoint, and Phil Bronner, co-founder and general partner at Ardent, will join the company’s board as part of the investment.
The $10 million marks Verituity’s first outside funding since the venture launched in the first quarter of 2020 out of 15-year-old management consulting firm The MITA Group Inc. MITA has since rebranded to Verituity and changed its focus solely to verified digital payouts because of the market opportunity for the fintech offering, Turner said. MITA, which launched in 2005 to help incubate startups, used its own cashflow to fund Verituity until now.
Verituity helps banks handle the often fraught steps behind every refund request and insurance claim. Companies need to verify those people's identities, and banks need to ensure the money goes to the right place. The platform verifies identifies, validates accounts and streamlines that process. Its customers include service providers issuing refunds, mortgage companies transferring money and insurance companies paying claims, for instance.
It operates in this space alongside competitors such as PayPal-owned Hyperwallet; Ingo Money of Alpharetta, Georgia; Volante Technologies of Jersey City, New Jersey; and Fiserv of Brookfield, Wisconsin. The business sells its platform to banks via a subscription service. Turner declined to disclose revenue, but said the early-stage company is seeing “rapid revenue growth.”
The new financing enables Verituity to expand its presence in the market and continue developing its cloud-based platform, which aims to help banks modernize their treasury services, Turner said in an email. To that end, he said, the company plans to use the new funding to further incorporate machine learning and automation into its platform “to drive the intersection of verification, fraud and successful digital payouts across multiple payment types and countries.”
Verituity has an existing presence in more than 70 countries, he said, “and we plan to continue to expand that coverage.” The company also plans to build up its sales team to move deeper within the U.S. market in the next 12 months. It is also looking to hire 15 to 20 people with experience in payments, banking, identity or cloud technology this year, for engineering, sales and data science positions, Turner said.
The company's growth came as the coronavirus pandemic caused a surge in demand for digital payouts as banks had to compete with fintech companies. “As the need for digital payouts explodes, so is the need for banks and their business clients to have confidence in real-time they know who they are paying, they are paying the right payee and payment account, and their payout will complete on the first time and on-time,” Turner said.
