Onfidoan early mover in the world of identity verification using computer vision and other artificial intelligence tools is being acquired, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed. I trust — the privately held company that provides a range of authentication and verification services related to payment cards, passwords, network and website access, device access and more — is buying the London-based startup, sources say, for a sum “well above from” 400 million dollars.
The deal does not yet have a closing date as it is still going through regulatory approvals. These are officially described as “early and exclusive” negotiations at this time by the two companies. Once that process is complete, the plan will be to integrate Onfido’s tools into Entrust’s broader technology stack, Entrust CEO and president Todd Wilkinson said in an interview.
“As we bring Onfido together with Entrust, we’re going to have a leadership position in almost that identity lifecycle,” he said. Entrust has been around since the 1990s, and Datacard (which acquired Entrust and rebranded as the latter-named business) has been around since 1969, so it’s notable that one of the key things it’s picking up here is a comprehensive addition of AI-based tools. . “Tools like Onfido’s Atlas AI, it’s no surprise that AI is a big draw for us, right?” he added.
The price and other financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, Wilkinson said. He noted that Entrust itself is profitable, and has been for many years, and currently has “just under $1 billion” in revenue annually with about 10,000 customers, including governments, major banks around the world and large enterprises. It has no shareholders as such and is privately owned by a German family, he said.
Onfido, meanwhile, was founded by Husayn Kassai when he was still a student at Oxford. He was later joined by Eamon Jubbawy and Ruhul Amin as co-founders.
Much of its journey mirrors other big currents in the tech world: the last big boom in artificial intelligence in the 2010s (founded in 2012) that saw it raise money from investors like TPG, Salesforce, Microsoft and nearly 50 other companies and well-known persons. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, his star rose higher as all Transactions went digital and the need for digital-based identity verification tools became an even higher priority. (Indeed, the last funding it disclosed was $100 million in 2020, at the peak of that era.)
The lifting of the post-pandemic downturn in the economy and the return from the “new normal”—changes that hit many other tech companies—certainly hit Onfido as well. Kassai went out of business a few years ago and has been rumored to be unofficially looking for a buyer for the past few years.
Entrust’s move to acquire Onfido comes at a pivotal time in the tech world. With a security and data breach on the rise for many consumers and businesses, and a wave of regulations aimed at better data protection, authentication and identity technologies are scrambling to meet the rush of cloud-based digital services that are now an integral part of the way things are done of the world, but they have also expanded the attack surface for malicious hackers looking for vulnerabilities to exploit.
The company already has an extensive range of services and works in some of the most sensitive sectors of the market, such as government and financial services. but an acquisition of artificial intelligence will give it another critical step in meeting the challenges of providing services suited to the challenges of today and possibly tomorrow.
It also speaks to the larger trend we’ve seen in consolidating point solutions across larger platforms.
“I think it’s a confusing market for a lot of end users because there are a lot of players in the space,” Wilkinson said. “This has been great from a creativity and competitiveness perspective, but it’s also challenging from an end-user perspective. What we’ve seen over the last year is, frankly, for companies like ours that have solid financial platforms, we’ve had an opportunity to thrive.”
We’ve reached out to Onfido for comment on this story and will update when we have it. For now, we only have a canned statement from a press release:
“We are excited to begin early and exclusive discussions with Entrust to potentially expand access to the world’s most advanced and secure digital identity verification solutions,” Mike Tuchen, CEO of Onfido, said in a statement. “Digital IDs enable new levels of simplicity and access for people around the world. Onfido’s AI and machine learning-driven strong identity verification capabilities and Entrust’s proven identity security solutions will enable a new world of digital trust.”
