Bureau CEO and founder Ranjan Reddy
Every company doing business digitally faces the same problem. Each time they sign up a new customer, they must ask themselves, “Do I know who this customer really is, and can I trust them?”. Answering those questions at scale is challenging, particularly since customers don’t want to be kept waiting. Fraud and identity platform Bureau, which is today announcing the completion of a $16.5 million Series A funding round, thinks it can help.
“We founded Bureau to build a single source of digital trust,” says Ranjan Reddy, CEO and founder of the company, which was launched in 2020. “Working with us, companies know their consumers are who they say they are and that they have good intentions, and consumers know their digital identities and privacy are going to be safe and secure.”
That is vital given the scale of the threat. The market research analyst Gartner estimates that cyber fraud will be costing the world as much as $1 trillion annually by 2025. In the US alone, identity theft incidents have been increasing at a rate of 45% a year according to data from the Federal Trade Commission.
As a result, a growing number of cyber security providers and other firms have launched a broad range of products to help combat attacks. Gartner forecasts that the market for fraud detection and prevention platforms will be worth $142 billion by 2028. Almost three-quarters of spending is expected to take place in the financial services industry, where regulation provides an additional headache, but every company is vulnerable to fraud.
Bureau’s solution is a platform that takes a three-stage approach to identity verification and authorisation. Its system starts by checking the customer’s digital persona – anything from a mobile telephone number or email address to a Government ID. Next, the system attempts to map that persona to a real person, to establish that the identity genuinely exists. Finally, the platform uses behavioural data to question whether the identity request is unusual. Red flags might include, for example, data showing the person in question has never been in touch from a certain geography before, or even a mismatch with biometric data linked to their phone.
Having done these checks in near real time, Bureau provides a recommendation on whether its client should accept the new customer, turn them away, or ask for more information to make further checks.
Bureau, of course, is not alone in offering identity services, but the company insists it differentiates in a couple of ways. “On our platform, we do all of these checks in one place, rather than expecting clients to stitch together solutions from different vendors,” Reddy adds. “We also provide a clear outcome – a recommendation for the decision – rather than just giving the client data and leaving them to accept or refuse the customer.”
It’s a pitch that seems to be resonating with customers. Bureau has increased customer numbers – and revenues – six times’ over during the past 12 months, verifying more than 300 million identities on its platform so far.
That record has seen investors take a close interest in the business. Investors in its Series A round include GMO Venture Partners and GMO Payment Gateway, alongside Quona Capital, Commerce Ventures and Okta Ventures. The round takes the total amount of funding raised by the business to date to a little over $20 million.
The lion’s share of the new funding is earmarked for further investment in Bureau’s data science capabilities, Reddy says. The more data the company can access – and the more sophisticated the tools it can bring to this data – the more accurate its decision recommendations will be.
Regulated businesses, particularly in financial services, are a prime target market for the company, since these customers are legally required to put in place robust know-your-customer, anti-money laundering and cybersecurity provisions. But the company also sees use cases for clients in non-regulated industries. The online dating world, for example, is rife with identity theft, Reddy points out.
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