Our Investment in Veriff: Building the Infrastructure for Trust Online

Today, we are welcoming Veriff to the Accel Family. We’re thrilled to support their bold vision of building the infrastructure for trust online via highly automated, video-first ID verification (IDV).    

We first learned about Veriff in the way that every investor hopes to learn about a potential new investment: our own portfolio and operator community told us that there was a company in Estonia helping them build trust online, Veriff. 

At the time, it was clear to us that the identity/KYC stack was undergoing a refresh as more interactions were moving online and regulation was being rewritten to enable 100% digital onboarding. Layer on a year of remote work bringing forward years of future use cases such as employee onboarding, and you have the makings of a market that is truly inflecting. 

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With the market trends pointing in the right direction, our next task was sifting through the noise to see who was building real, differentiated technology.  The result of this work is reminiscent of our findings as we dug into the communications API market ahead of investing in MessageBird.  At the time, there were many providers claiming to offer a comparable product, but the reality was MessageBird had done the heavy lifting building the infrastructure that allowed them to structurally deliver a better experience than any other player in the market.  After speaking with IDV/KYC process owners, developers integrating with IDV products, and numerous end users interacting with the onboarding workflows, a familiar theme was emerging - Veriff had done the heavy lifting.  

Veriff delivers the strongest identity verification service available online. Its innovative technology leverages more than 1,000 data points to give transparent responses and provide security and trust for businesses. While others have focused on document data extraction and lightweight verifications, Veriff’s strong and ambitious video-first verification approach expands the reach of its service capabilities across sectors and use cases.  As a result, many of the largest and most forward-thinking organizations globally have put their trust in Veriff.

We are only just beginning to see the extent of the digital interactions that Veriff will secure over time and we are excited to join Kaarel and the Veriff team on this exciting journey.

-Matthew Weigand