Socure accelerates mission to verify identities and eliminate identity fraud across industries

By Edlyn Cardoza

Socure, the leading provider of digital identity verification and fraud solutions, announced its significantly oversubscribed $450 million round at a $4.5 billion valuation from a number of the world’s best growth equity and public market investors. The company achieved a $4.5 billion valuation just seven months after its $1.3 billion Series D, on the back of 500% year-over-year bookings growth and nearly $1 billion of investment demand, earning Socure the highest valuation for any private company in the identity verification space.

The round is part of a Series E transaction led by Accel alongside funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. It also includes two new investors, Bain Capital Ventures and Tiger Global, and existing investors, Commerce Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Sorenson Ventures.

Socure will substantially accelerate its investments in product innovation to address identity verification challenges across the entire digital consumer journey, penetrate new markets, including the public sector, and continue to attract and retain the best product, data science, and engineering teams in the world. The capital will also allow Socure to maximize the scale and intelligence of its customer consortium data and fully automated ID+ platform to prevent third party and synthetic fraud and address payment and first-party fraud risk while enabling world-class self-service analytics capabilities.

Socure ID+ has become the preferred identity verification and fraud platform for enterprises of all sizes and is trusted by four of the five largest banks, seven of the ten largest credit card issuers, top Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) providers, top investment management firms, top crypto exchanges, and the majority of top FinTechs. The company is also accelerating its market leadership in telehealth, gaming, e-commerce marketplaces, and the public sector. Socure customers have also become investors in the company, including Citi Ventures, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, Capital One Ventures, MVB Bank, Voyager, and Synchrony. Other marquee customers include Chime, SoFi, Varo Money, Public, Stash, and DraftKings.

Socure has emerged as a clear leader providing complete identity verification and fraud platform with the highest adoption across all industries. It distanced itself from the competition with a 500% year-over-year bookings increase, 221% year-over-year customer growth, and five consecutive quarters of record year-over-year revenue growth. Last quarter, Socure also achieved an industry-leading net retention rate of 179%, driven by near-zero attrition as its enterprise customers increasingly deployed multiple Socure products across various divisions, making Socure their complete fraud prevention device KYC, AML, and document verification platform. 

Identity fraud continues to be fuelled by the pandemic as more businesses and government agencies race to digitize, but with devastating consequences. According to Javelin Strategy & Research, in the private sector, identity fraud losses in the U.S. in 2020 reached a total of $56 billion. And in the public sector, 2020 identity fraud losses in unemployment alone totalled $400 billion. John Locke, a Partner, Accel, said, “Every team building a digital product faces challenges validating users and security. Socure’s API has quickly become foundational to these teams. The platform has been transformational for the identity market, and we’re excited to further our support of Johnny Ayers and the team.”

Amidst the race to digitize, enterprises need to fuel their growth with new customers to remain competitive. Particularly those hard to identify, including the 45 million+ groups of U.S. citizens that are credit invisible, especially younger, thin file 18-25-year-olds and immigrants. Due to the unparalleled accuracy and inclusiveness of Socure’s KYC identity verification solution, if used exclusively across the country’s financial services industry, Socure’s technology could more than double the amount of automated approvals made in the U.S. in any given year for this population compared to legacy solutions. 

Johnny Ayers, Founder and CEO, Socure, said, “When you’re a market leader, you move from attacking and replacing the incumbents repeatedly as you earn your seat at the table to truly being a strategic partner to many of the best companies in the world. With this additional capital, we will substantially increase our level of commercial velocity and intensity in solving complex customer and societal problems, while maintaining our Day 0 founder’s mentality and continuing to attract the market’s best product, data science, and engineering minds to join our already incredibly talented team. We will remain laser focused on our mission to verify 100% of good identities and eliminate fraud on the Internet while holding ourselves to the highest quality standards and cementing Socure as the top performing company in the industry.”