Agency CEO and Founder Ranjan Reddy
Every company that does business digitally faces the same problem. Every time they sign up a new customer, they should ask themselves, “Do I know who this customer really is and can I trust them?”. Answering those questions at scale is a challenge, especially since customers don’t want to be left waiting. Fraud and identity platform Deskwhich today announces the completion of a $16.5 million Series A round of financing, believes it can help.
“We created Bureau to build a single source of digital trust,” said Ranjan Reddy, CEO and founder of the company, which launched in 2020. “By working with us, companies know their consumers are who they say they are and they have good intentions, and consumers know their digital identity and privacy will be secure.”
This is essential given the scale of the threat. Market research analyst Gartner estimates that cyber fraud will cost the world as much as $1 trillion a year by 2025. .
As a result, a growing number of cybersecurity providers and other companies have launched a wide variety of products to help combat attacks. Gartner predicts that the market for fraud detection and prevention platforms will be worth $142 billion by 2028. Nearly three-quarters of spending is expected to be in the financial services industry, where regulation creates additional headaches but every business is vulnerable to fraud.
Bureau’s solution is a platform that takes a three-stage approach to identity verification and authorization. The system starts by verifying the customer’s digital identity – anything from a mobile phone number or email address to a government ID. Then the system tries to map that persona to a real person, to determine that the identity really exists. Finally, the platform uses behavioral data to investigate whether the identity request is unusual. For example, red flags could include data showing that the person in question has never had contact from a particular geography before, or even a mismatch with biometrics associated with their phone.
After these checks are performed in near real-time, Bureau makes a recommendation on whether the customer should accept, reject, or ask for more information to perform further checks on the new customer.
Bureau isn’t alone in offering identity services, of course, but the company insists it sets itself apart in a number of ways. “On our platform, we do all these checks in one place, rather than expecting customers to aggregate solutions from different vendors,” adds Reddy. “We also provide a clear result – a recommendation for the decision – rather than just giving the customer details and leaving it up to them to accept or decline the customer.”
It’s a pitch that seems to be catching on with customers. Agency has increased its client base – and revenue – sixfold in the last 12 months and has verified more than 300 million identities on its platform to date.
That record has caused investors to take great interest in the company. Investors in the Series A round include GMO Venture Partners and GMO Payment Gateway, in addition to Quona Capital, Commerce Ventures and Okta Ventures. The round brings the total amount the company has raised to date to just over $20 million.
The lion’s share of the new funding will go toward further investment in Bureau’s data science capabilities, Reddy says. The more data the company can request – and the more sophisticated the tools it can use on that data – the more accurate the decision recommendations will be.
Regulated companies, particularly in the financial services industry, are a key target market for the Company, as these clients are required by law to have robust know-your-customer, anti-money laundering and cybersecurity provisions in place. But the company also sees use cases for customers in unregulated industries. For example, the online dating world is rife with identity theft, Reddy emphasises.
