Brazil-based idwall has recently raised $38 million in a Series C round led by Endurance for further expansions, according to the media. Other funding participants in the round include GGV Capital, monashees, Canary, Qualcomm Ventures LLC, ONEVC, Peninsula and Norte. The current total raise of the company has reached $50 million.
idwall was started as an automated background check solution in 2016 by Lincoln Ando and Raphael Melo in São Paulo. It further grew into a suite of data and identity validation and risk analysis products. Its MeuID app is focused on users who prefer to change the way they identify themselves and share their data. Online fraudulence and identity theft are a global problem that has been aggravated by the increase in online transactions amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. Media reports show that Brazilian companies lose up to $14 billion to fraud in a year.
The company says it has grown 1,458 percent between 2017 and 2020, with an average growth of 144 percent per year. Its 300 clients include 10 unicorns, two out of the three biggest banks in Brazil, and companies such as iFood, Claro, Cielo, Loggi, Ebanx, QuintoAndar and OLX. A significant portion of its client base is fintech. Last year, idwall’s revenue from clients in the financial services rose by 588 percent compared to the year before.
Machine learning and AI are the components of idwall that help automate the onboarding process via its face match, background check, risk analysis, ID validation and automated optical character recognition (OCR) offerings to help companies avoid fraud. The APIs verify personal documents and information by searching in the public and private databases quickly and pursuant to the compliance rules given the ID is authentic. The company claims that the entire verification process takes less than three minutes.