Footprint, a company that unifies KYC (Know Your Customer), security and authentication to automate consumer onboarding and reduce identity fraud, announced a $13 million Series A led by QED Investors. The round included participation from existing investors Index Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Operator Partners, BoxGroup, Palm Tree Capital and Definition. New investors Neo and Animal Capital also participated.
The funding will be used to double down on the Footprint product, providing the highest fidelity verification for people and ways to utilize identities within Footprint tomorrow. This includes expanding the breadth and depth of the Footprint offering. Footprint will launch its fraud suite and expand the number and types of identification consumers can use to verify, including credit bureau data, pay stubs and vehicle data. The funding announcement coincides with the launch of Footprint Connections, a tool to connect its customers to each other to leverage the portability created within the platform.
“Core to Footprint is a new philosophy around who fraud and KYC companies should be trying to identify,” said Footprint CEO and co-founder Eli Wachs. “Companies look to screen out bad actors but there are an infinite amount. In a new age of GenAI, fraudsters have even more tools to mass-create an abundant amount of authentic-seeming identities.
“We needed a new approach – one that labels good actors – so Footprint created a centralized network of authentic, de-duplicated identities. Now we can narrow the scope of who is in a pre-vetted field, leaving fraudsters less room to hide.”
Today, product and risk teams at companies face a familiar tradeoff between fraud and friction. In the past, the best way to reduce fraud was to add friction to the onboarding experience, but increased friction may deter some authentic users. By contrast, companies that over-optimized for conversion with lower friction risked higher potential fraud losses over time.
This is because current point solutions are not able to fundamentally address the root problems. Existing backend KYC tools are unable to actively assess behavioral risk – for example, whether a name or social security number was copied and pasted into a form. A fraud detection tool may be able to pick up those red flags, but it has no capability to challenge the user by asking for additional documentation to verify their identity.
Footprint combines these tools in one product, using “components” to unify KYC, authentication and fraud into a single rules engine for account creation and sign-in.
Components are UX elements that can be customized to collect onboarding information. This can include a name, date of birth, address, social security number or document scan. Footprint can dynamically prompt users to collect additional documentation at the time of account creation or when they sign back in. Additionally, Footprint makes identity “portable.” This creates an Apple Pay-like experience for consumers when they visit a second application that uses Footprint, meaningfully reducing friction for companies and users over time.
Footprint is built on several key pieces of technologies:
- Extensible decision and rules engine connected to large identity datasets, enabling customers to create automatic step-ups to improve verification and conversion rates with no-code
- Cutting-edge document and selfie verification flow built on native AppClip/InstantApp user experience to create delightful native user experiences and verify the authenticity of the device capturing the document or images
- Passkeys meant to bind a biometric to PII to prevent ATOs and phishing
- Powerful vaulting infrastructure powered by AWS’s secure computing environment (Nitro Enclaves), ensuring customer data is collected securely and kept private
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