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Onfido is a software company that helps businesses verify people's identities using a photo-based identity document, a selfie and artificial intelligence algorithms.

Onfido launched in 2012 and was initially focused on doing background checks for businesses hiring large numbers of permanent staff and contractors. However it has shifted its focus to financial services and e-commerce companies. These companies are required to verify the identities of people with whom they do business as part of “Know Your Customer” (KYC) regulations and to help prevent fraud. Onfido helps them to do this without onerous background checks.

The company also wants to help get people who don't currently have bank accounts into the banking system. Almost 40% of the world’s adult population is excluded from opening a bank account, most often due to having thin credit files, or being new migrants without the requisite documents needed for in-person verification and legally required Anti-Money Laundering checks.

Almost everyone now has a smartphone with a built-in camera and Onfido is able to use this to compare and cross-reference a person’s facial biometrics with their identify document, such as driver’s license. The person’s identification can then be checked against global databases for any issues.

According to TechCrunch the company has 1,500 customers including Square, Revolut and Zipcar.

Onfido is headquartered in London and has 150 employees in offices across San Francisco, New York, Lisbon, and New Delhi.

History
Husayn Kassai, Eamon Jubbawy, and Ruhul Amin were in their final year at Oxford University and were applying for jobs at financial institutions in London’s City. Each went through a check that took from 2-6 weeks. They spotted that 80-90 percent of a background check was manual done manually and therefore prone to human error. Background-checking companies also have runners on the ground in many countries to manually go into police stations and courthouses to check records. Even worse, manual checking is often handled on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis and there are 13 separate jurisdictions in Germany, 116 in France and 3,200 in the U.S. They decided to build a technological solution to the problem and secured seed funding of £200,000 from Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, launching Onfido in August 2012. By April 2016 it had done almost 10m background checks

Funding
Onfido has raised around $60m from a number of investors including Wellington Partners, Idinvest Partners, Crane Venture Partners, Microsoft Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.