– USA, CA – Berbix, an instant identity verification platform founded by former Airbnb Trust and Safety team members, today announced a $9 million Series A round of financing led by Mayfield alongside existing investors including Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and Fika Ventures.
Concurrent with the financing, Patrick Salyer, Mayfield partner, joins the board, with the capital being earmarked for team and customer growth.
“As early-stage, people-first investors, our key consideration always remains the founding team, as we build lasting partnerships,” said Patrick Salyer. “Besides Steve and Eric’s passion for making the Internet safer, they’ve delivered a better and faster ID verification solution which leverages machine learning techniques to instantly spot fraud undetectable by the human eye. Through our experience at Gigya, the leading customer identity management platform, we realized that streamlined ID solutions deliver delightful customer experiences, so we had a prepared mind on the attributes of next-generation identity solutions.”
Berbix was founded in 2018 by Steve Kirkham and Eric Levine who previously led the Trust and Safety team at Airbnb. The two had a mission to make the Internet safer by providing a better and faster process for ID verification. After trying nearly every solution in the market, they decided that a new generation of ID verification solutions could replace slow, expensive and cumbersome solutions with technology that does the job faster, and more effectively and securely. The Berbix team learned during their time at Airbnb that being able to confidently know the identity of the user behind a keyboard was a foundational problem for stopping fraud. They found that if you cannot answer that initial question, fraudsters would turn to identity theft, phishing or other circumventions to avoid accurate identification.
“The need for an instant identity verification system has grown in urgency as digital transformation has fast-forwarded a decade in our post-COVID world,” said co-founder and CEO, Steve Kirkham. “Growth has continued to exceed our expectations during the COVID-19 pandemic. This time last year, we processed the same number of verifications in a month that we do daily today. The inability to conduct traditional identity checks in person has forced organizations to move online for innumerable use cases. One example is the Family Independence Initiative, a non-profit that trusts and invests in families’ own efforts to escape poverty. Our software has enabled them to eliminate fraudulent applications and focus on the families who have been economically affected by COVID.”
The company’s instant identity verification platform helps consumers and businesses across a number of industries verify age, fight chargebacks and deter marketplace fraud while removing operational overhead. Companies like Eaze use Berbix to simultaneously catch fake IDs in addition to improving a previously cumbersome and manual process.
“We want to be recognized as the most trusted source for on-demand cannabis delivery,” said Kenneth Lau, Eaze’s Director of Trust & Safety, “Berbix’s ID verification process allows us to quickly convert our customers, protect customer and driver safety, and maintain our reputation as a compliant business in a highly regulated industry.”
About Berbix
Berbix is based in San Francisco and was founded with the mission of making the Internet safer by providing a better & faster alternative for ID verification. Its unique solution combines simplicity and automation to deliver a delightful identity verification experience for consumers and businesses. Berbix is privately held and supported by top-tier investors including Mayfield and Initialized Capital.
For more information: https://www.berbix.com/
About Mayfield
Mayfield is a venture capital firm with a people-first philosophy and $2.5 billion under management. Mayfield invests primarily in early-stage consumer, enterprise and engineering biology companies. Since its founding 50 years ago, the firm has invested in more than 500 companies, resulting in 117 IPOs and more than 200 acquisitions. Some notable investments in recent years include CloudSimple, Elastica, Grove Collaborative, HashiCorp, Lyft, Mammoth Biosciences, Marketo, Moat, Outreach, Poshmark, ServiceMax and SolarCity.
For more information: https://www.mayfield.com/
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