Salesforce Ventures and Talis Capital back Onfido

London and San Francisco-based Onfido, an identity verification and background checking provider, has secured an undisclosed amount of funding. The investors included Salesforce Ventures and Talis Capital.

PRESS RELEASE

San Francisco, CA August 12, 2016 – Onfido, a leading global identity verification and background checking provider, today announced it has raised funding from Salesforce Ventures, Talis Capital and angel investors to scale its machine learning-enabled trust solutions for financial services firms.

Onfido will use the funds to further extend its unique offering for finance: Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) solutions that significantly improve remote identity verification. Many retail financial transactions requiring KYC/AML verification are riddled with obstacles and inefficiencies, built on paperwork and manual document verification. Onfido’s machine learning-based technology allows clients to carry out robust, remote KYC/AML through one simple API.

Joining Salesforce Ventures are Talis Capital, investors in Darktrace, angel investors Charlie Songhurst, founder of Katana Capital and former Head of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft; and Hank Vigil, a general partner at Acequia Capital and former Senior Vice President of Strategy and Partnerships at Microsoft. Earlier in the year, Onfido announced their Series B round from Idinvest Partners, Wellington Partners and CrunchFund.

“FinTech innovation is disrupting and reshaping how financial companies operate,” said Husayn Kassai, CEO and co-founder at Onfido. “But traditional ID verification technology is not keeping up. On average, between 30-50 percent of people going through in-person ID verification do not complete the manual onboarding process. Onfido automates KYC/AML to eliminate inefficiencies and improve the experience on both sides of the transaction. We’re pleased to welcome our new investors to advance our superior KYC/AML solution.”

“It’s critical that businesses today can quickly identify fraudsters and other risky actors,” said Matus Maar, Partner at Talis Capital. “But just as importantly, they must be able to quickly verify those who should be trusted, in order to onboard them without any delay. Onfido is uniquely qualified to apply advanced technology to improve retail finance transactions.”

With offices in London and San Francisco, Onfido is powering background checks and identity verification for top on-demand service providers and financial institutions.

About Salesforce Ventures
Salesforce Ventures—Salesforce’s corporate investment group—invests in the next generation of enterprise technology to help companies connect with their customers in entirely new ways. Portfolio companies receive funding as well as access to the world’s largest cloud ecosystem and the guidance of Salesforce’s innovators and executives. With Salesforce Ventures, portfolio companies can also leverage Salesforce’s expertise in corporate philanthropy by joining Pledge 1% to make giving back part of their business model. Salesforce has invested in more than 150 enterprise cloud startups since 2009. For more information, please visit www.salesforce.com/ventures.

About Talis Capital
Talis Capital is a Private Equity and Venture Capital firm with a focus on real businesses and B2B services. Talis Capital completed over $400m transactions since 2009.
www.taliscapital.com

About Onfido
Onfido delivers next-generation identity verification and background checks, helping businesses across the world onboard more users and reduce fraud. Powered by machine-learning technology, Onfido is a fast and simple way for businesses to verify identities — to ensure that someone is who they say they are — and run adverse history searches such as Criminal or Anti-Money Laundering Checks. Built for an online world, Onfido’s solution enables businesses across sectors to run checks remotely and at scale.

Founded in 2012 by three entrepreneurs from Oxford University, Onfido has received over $30m in funding to date. Today, Onfido works with over 1,000 clients globally. It’s mission: build the trust engine to power human interactions worldwide.