Identiq Raises $5M Seed, Launches Privacy-First Identity Validation Network So Companies Can Fight Fraud Together

Identiq announced today the launch of its Anonymous Verification Network, enabling companies to truly work together to fight fraud for the very first time. It also announced today a seed funding round of $5M led by Entrée Capital, with participants from leading VCs, including Slow Ventures, Vertex Ventures and Oryzn Capital.

Identiq has created a distributed network allowing members to positively validate new users, and vouch for ones they already know, without sharing any personal user data whatsoever. Identity can be verified at critical moments in the customer journey, like onboarding or first payment, by making crucial connections between data points such as email, phone, address, IP, device or funding source, etc. This new approach leads to more accurate decisions, lower decline rates, reduced fraud, and better user experience for consumers.

Until now solutions attempted to validate identity information using large databases of private and personal user information, which by nature involve the risk of data being shared without user consent, or even stolen. Companies using these centralized solutions must expose their own user data, putting them at risk of breach-by-proxy, disclosing trade secrets, and violating privacy regulations.

Identiq, on the other hand, does not collect, share or store any user data whatsoever. Their FAIR (Fully Anonymous Identity Resolution) technology uses proprietary cryptographic protocols to obtain validation from other network members while preserving complete consumer privacy. This makes it fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations, and the first solution designed to complement the new sensitivities arising around such data privacy issues.

Interestingly, Identiq bucks recent trends in the Identity space and shuns the use of blockchain technology. They explained this decision in a post on Medium: .