By Jane Lanhee Lee
(Reuters) – Trulioo, a Canadian-based startup that provides electronic identity and address verification globally, said on Monday it raised $394 million in a funding round led by venture capital firm TCV and that it is now valued at $1.75 billion.
The mega funding round comes as the pandemic accelerated the digitization of businesses and e-commerce firms and financial firms need ways to verify customers’ identities for secure transactions.
The Vancouver-based company has access to over 450 different data sources, including those of governments and credit bureaus, as well as phone records and information from nontraditional sources, said Steve Munford, Trulioo’s CEO.
“And the key, what we do here, which is really important in a world that is even more concerned about privacy, is we do it without seeing your information and without seeing the data it is being compared to. So it’s done in an encrypted transaction,” said Munford.
TCV general partner Jake Reynolds told Reuters his fund is heavily invested in online marketplaces and financial services startups and that it recognized the increasing need for global identity verification. Many of those startups were already using Trulioo, he said. “We know the problems that they’re seeing and we know the momentum behind all those businesses as well and saw the growth,” said Reynolds.
Trulioo said the U.S. digital identity market is projected to exceed $30 billion by 2023, according to consulting firm One World Identity.
Among the participants in the latest funding round, Trulioo said, were existing investors Amex Ventures, Citi Ventures, Blumberg Capital and Mouro Capital.
(Reporting by Jane Lanhee Lee in Oakland, Calif.; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
