Blume venture-backed identity verification platform IDfy raises $27 million

Team IDfy. Dfy offers products and solutions for KYC, KYB, employee background verifications, risk and fraud mitigation.

IDfy, an integrated identity verification and digital onboarding platform, has raised $27 million in a mix of primary and secondary fundraise from Elev8, KB Investment, and Tenacity Ventures.

The Mumbai-based fraud detection platform will use the funds to further strengthens its position, including expanding globally, the company said on March 6.

“Our mission is to eliminate fraud and establish trust. The funds will fuel our expansion plans and product development, enabling us to serve even more businesses and unlock opportunities for trustworthy people and businesses,” co-founder Ashok Hariharan told Moneycontrol.

Founded in 2011 by Hariharan and Vineet Jawa, IDfy offers products and solutions for KYC, KYB, employee background verifications, risk and fraud mitigation, digital onboarding and digital privacy.

“We look into hundreds of data points starting from bank statements, public court records, assets verification among others to do a complete check. Fraud is an evolving space, and you need dedicated platforms to navigate this for companies,” Hariharan said.

IDfy previously raised Rs 86 crore in its series D round led by New York Stock Exchange-listed TransUnion and early stage VC firm Blume Ventures.

The company, operated by Baldor Technologies Pvt Ltd, claims to run over 60 million verifications a month and has over 1,500 clients across BFSI, FMCG, e-commerce, gaming, sharing economy, and conglomerates across India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

Some of the notable names include HDFC Bank, AxisBank, Zomato, PhonePe, Paytm, HUL and American Express. The company clocked a revenue of Rs 120 crore in FY23 and claims to be EBITDA positive since the said financial year.

Growing market

Identity verification and fraud detection is among the top growing markets across the world.  The proliferation of identity fraud using deepfake technology and forged documents has emerged as a big menace across the board.

In the past decade, several inflection points in fields of AI have occurred that allow for the creation of synthetic images, a Gartner report said. These artificially generated images of real people’s faces, known as deepfakes, can be used by malicious actors to undermine biometric authentication or render it inefficient.

As a result, organisations may begin to question the reliability of identity verification and authentication solutions, as they will not be able to tell whether the face of the person being verified is a live person or a deepfake.

To tackle this, platforms, including IDfy, Perfios, Signzy and Hyperverge have come up with multiple integrated solutions to allow companies to have a thorough check, besides KYC and Officially Valid Documents (OVD) documents like driving licence, passport, voter's identity card, Aadhaar etc. of their clients, employees and potential partners.

They claim to deploy large LLM models, multi-layered strategy  and new-age technology to outbid these frauds.

For a lending firm, IDfy, for instance, does an end-to-end journey from collecting a borrower’s data, including video KYC, validating the same to check if they are original using technology, to onboarding and signing consent.

“We are among the first to have a DPDP compliance platforms in our system,” Hariharan said.

The Indian identity verification market is projected to register a CAGR of 16.42 percent during the forecast period, 2023-2030, a report by GII research says.