Identity management used to mean making sure you had your driver’s license with you when you left the house, but nowadays it’s not that simple: identity is the basis of how we interact with the digital world and identity services can take many forms ( and abuse). Now it gets even more interesting: the huge advances we’re seeing in areas like AI raise big questions and challenges when it comes to proving we are who we say we are and like us bad actors can catch, who take advantage of dangerous situations.
On tonight’s episode of TechCrunch Live – May 10, 12 p.m. Pacific Time – we’ll talk about that and more with Rick Song, the CEO and co-founder of Persona, one of the big unicorn startups that has benefited from this development; and Index Ventures’ Mark Goldberg, a star investor who was an early adopter of Persona and worries about how the verification game is playing out from a market and investment perspective.
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According to Song, most digital companies are not and don’t want to be experts when it comes to ID management. There are too many moving parts for it to be a core competency even in the world’s largest technology companies. And yet often the preferred way is to delegate the verification process to a third party responsible for the work.
“Most of them say, ‘Take that out of my hands,'” Song says of the verification task. “They need and would prefer someone else to take care of it.”
That opens the door for companies like Persona to take on and get that work done. The company started with an API for identity verification and has more recently expanded into a more comprehensive platform that covers not only this but also a range of other verification and identity management solutions, such as tools that allow its customers to process sensitive data as part of their work a broader service flow to perform fraud detection or risk assessments and more.
That broader development — and the large customers Persona has won, including some of the biggest names in retail and other consumer services — helped the company reach $1.5 billion in its most recent funding round.
That was in 2021, before the tech finance business took a nosedive. But there’s an argument that companies like Persona may well prove to be more resilient than others: identity and malicious activity surrounding identity are still hot topics in the tech space, and there’s still a long way to go in this market.
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