Persona Lands $17.5 Million in Series A Funding

The identity verification startup Persona has pulled in $17.5 million in Series A funding. The money comes primarily from investment firms, most notably Coatue and First Round Capital.

Persona was co-founded by two engineers (Square’s Rick Song and Dropbox’s Charles Yeh), and plans to use the funds to expand the scope of its operations. The company’s platform is essentially designed to provide an extra layer of security for the entire internet, providing user-friendly identity verification to cover every interaction, transaction, and use case.

To that end, Persona combines facial recognition with quizzes, document recognition, and other forms of authentication. Though the company does offer video-based liveness detection to guard against deepfakes – identity specialists like Jumio and Melissa have leveraged similar technology – Persona stressed that facial recognition is only one verification factor. The technology is deployed alongside other factors to provide a higher level of security.

Persona was also built to be appealing to businesses as well as consumers. For one thing, the platform can be easily integrated in a matter of days. More importantly, it limits the amount of personal information that is shared with other organizations. Persona only gives partners access to information that is necessary to complete core tasks, which reduces their exposure (and their liability) in the case of a data breach.

–

January 28, 2020 – by Eric Weiss