Estonian online verification company Veriff has closed a financing round worth 100 million US dollars, valuing the firm at 1.5 billion US dollars.
Estonia has another unicorn, identity verification (IDV) start-up Veriff, a firm that has the goal of offering everyone in the world a single digital identity.
In a series C funding round, co-led by Tiger Global and Alkeon, joined by existing investors IVP and Accel, the firm raised 100 million US dollars, bringing Veriff’s total funding so far to 200 million US dollars and a valuation of 1.5 billion US dollars.
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Veriff joins Skype, Playtech, Wise, Bolt, Pipedrive, ID.me and Zego in reaching a valuation of one billion US dollars or more.
Founded in 2015, Veriff aims to protect businesses and their customers from online identity fraud by making sure that a person is who they claim to be. Driven by artificial intelligence, Veriff’s technology can analyse and verify thousands of technological and behavioural variables in seconds.
The new financing will be used to accelerate Veriff’s global growth and invest in research and development, especially to advance product expansion. The company will also grow its sales and marketing teams to onboard more global clients and build on recent customer success programmes.
In addition, Tallinn-based Veriff will expand its global workforce, currently 360 strong.
Strong growth in 2021
Throughout 2021, Veriff rapidly increased verification volumes across the globe, with growth particularly strong in the United States.
“Organisations and consumers needed to verify identities online more than ever before in 2021 – from onboarding remote employees, to creating a safe space for gaming in the metaverse, and conducting business fully online – which makes the establishment of digital trust and transparency incredibly critical,” says Kaarel Kotkas, CEO and founder of Veriff.
“The gigantic boom in digital services has increased the demand for IDV for any business online, and every person on this planet can be a user of Veriff,” he adds.
Investors also point to the growth in digitalisation during Covid-19 as a driver.
“A reliable IDV solution for today’s digital businesses and consumers has been exacerbated over the past two years as all operations moved online to conduct business,” says John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global.
“Veriff has created an industry-leading product to ensure trust and safety online. Based on our research and customer calls, Veriff’s product performance leaves others far behind and should be used more widely by companies out there.”
According to Invest in Estonia, which promotes FDI in the Baltic country, Estonia has most unicorns per capita in Europe, while Crunchbase, a platform for finding business information about private and public companies, in November revealed that in terms of venture funding per capita in the previous 12 months, Estonia was third globally with 1.19 billion US dollars total funding, or 915 US dollars per capita, behind only Singapore and Israel.
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