Berbix, an online identity verification platform, has closed a $2.5m seed round to support further partnerships within the market.
Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, Fika Ventures, Dream Machine, and Liquid 2 Ventures contributed to the round, alongside several unnamed angel investors.
The company offers an easy and secure way to collect and verify photo IDs. Its technology can extract and validate the information from a driver licence, identification card, and passport. Following this, it can perform an optional selfie to match the details with the ID information.
In a blog post on the funding, the company said, “Relying on a social security number trace or knowledge-based authentication from a credit report is becoming increasingly problematic given the widespread data breaches that have exposed this underlying data. A bad actor could have the full name, date of birth, address history, and social security number for countless individuals. So how do you know if users are entering their own information or impersonating someone else?
“We saw an opportunity to tackle this problem by reliably checking photo IDs online in a fully-automatic yet conversion-friendly way.”
Capital from the round will support Berbix partner with marketplaces and other online platforms to increase the spread of its services.
Fika Ventures recently closed its sophomore fund with a capital pool of $76m, coming just two years after closing its debut vehicle. The firm invests into B2B and enterprise companies, with deals ranging from $500,000 to $1m.
