How AWS and FIDO Laid the Foundation for Footprint’s $13M Series A

“Meanwhile, the FIDO2 alliance agreed on a standard for private and secure auth–what Apple calls passkeys–in Q4 of 2022. This was the final missing piece we saw coming to let us build portable identity.” – Footprint co-founder Alex Grinman

KYC and authentication startup Footprint has announced a $13 million Series A funding round led by QED Investors. The round also saw participation from existing investors including Index Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, and Operator Partners, along with new investors Neo and Animal Capital.

Footprint aims to shift the focus from screening out bad actors to identifying good actors through a centralized network of verified identities. Footprint says its new funding will help its team to enhance its product, launch its fraud suite, and expand the types of identification methods used for verification.

The startup’s solution integrates KYC, authentication, and fraud detection into a single rules engine, dynamically prompting users for additional documentation as needed, thus reducing friction while maintaining security. Footprint’s technology stack includes a decision and rules engine connected to extensive identity datasets, as well as document and selfie-based verification flows, which bind biometrics to personally identifiable information (PII) to prevent account takeovers and phishing, and secure vaulting infrastructure powered by AWS Nitro Enclaves, a security feature of Amazon Web Services that provides isolated compute environments to process highly sensitive data, ensuring enhanced privacy and security.

Footprint was co-founded by serial entrepreneur Eli Wachs and Alex Grinman, a cryptography specialist who studied at MIT. In a statement announcing the funding round, Grinman laid out Footprint’s evolution in the context of broader changes in the tech ecosystem, emphasizing that “building portable identity really means creating a rules engine that can run on top of secure vaulting and strong authentication.”

“To me, this level of technology was not economically feasible for a startup to build before the release of Nitro Enclaves, which AWS released at the end of 2020,” Grinman explained. “Meanwhile, the FIDO2 alliance agreed on a standard for private and secure auth–what Apple calls passkeys–in Q4 of 2022. This was the final missing piece we saw coming to let us build portable identity.”

Since the debut of its enterprise platform last fall, Footprint has experienced notable expansion among its clients in sectors such as financial services, automotive, and real estate. One client reported an increase of over 50 percent in its onboarding completion rate due to Footprint’s dynamic tool. Another client utilized Footprint’s capabilities to identify an additional 3,000 fraud cases within the first six months. The company has formed partnerships in the banking sector, including collaborations with Treasury Prime and Apiture.

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May 23, 2024 – by Alex Perala