Jumio lands $150M from private equity firm Great Hill Partners

Dive Brief:

Jumio, the Palo Alto, California digital identity verification company, said it has landed a $150 million investment from Great Hill Partners. The companies did not disclose what size ownership stake Great Hill will now have in Jumio.
Jumio, which provides its technology for verifying the identity of people using financial accounts, said in a statement it plans to use the money from the Boston private equity firm to further automate its identity verification product, expand its platform and build up its anti-money laundering services. The company said it had record revenue and business volume last year.
Jumio said in the statement this is the "single largest fundraising round in the digital identity space." Two Great Hill partners, Nick Cayer and Matt Vettel, will join Jumio's board of directors as part of the transaction.

Dive Insight:

Currently, Jumio mainly focuses on B2B services, using digital identity verification tools including biometrics, computer vision, big data and machine learning to verify account-holders identity and thwart fraud for customers like British investment bank HSBC, according to a report from TechCrunch. With the new capital, Jumio is also exploring offering its tools more extensively to consumers who want to protect their identities online, TechCrunch said.

"Jumio's innovations helped establish the identity verification market, and the need to establish someone's digital identity remotely has never been greater," Jumio CEO Robert Prigge said in the statement.

New account fraud dropped last year by 23% versus 2019 thanks to identity verification, Jumio told Pymnts.com.

Jumio is sourcing the money from a private equity firm that has a lot of experience in both payments and identity verification technology companies. Great Hill has had stakes in payments companies that include BlueSnap, Paytronix, VersaPay and AffiniPay, and also in security and authentication companies such as SecureWorks and Confirmation.

Before this fundraising round, Jumio had raised $13 million, said Alexandra Mercurio, a spokeswoman for the company. Still, last year, Jumio acquired Beam Solutions, a San Francisco-based company operating in the same field, focused on transaction monitoring and case management, among other things.

Jumio, with 1,500 employees, has "annual recurring revenue" of about $100 million, Mercurio said. The five year-old company has been growing revenue at a rapid double-digit rate, she said.

In recent years, a host of companies have jumped into the area of verifying digital identities and providing fraud detection services, including LINSR and SentiLink.