Australian ID verification startup OCR Labs raises $15M Collection A to increase into UK/Turkey/Europe – TechCrunch

With the gig economic system got here the necessity for ID verification, thus startups like OnFido (raised $188.8 million) appeared, alongside a number of others. However this sector is not at all ‘achieved’ but.

Now, OCR Labs, which emerged from Australia, has introduced a €12.5M / $15 million Collection A funding spherical led by Turkish buyers Oyak Group, to increase its providers and workforce to the UK, Turkey and Europe. Halkin Ventures invested in its seed spherical. The startup focuses on digital ID verification, buyer onboarding, id fraud, and regulatory compliance.

OCR Labs, based in 2018 by Daniel Aiello and Matthew Adams, says its expertise makes use of “5 proprietary applied sciences in a single answer, together with id doc optical character recognition (OCR), doc fraud evaluation, liveness detection, video fraud evaluation, and face matching”. This helps AML and KYC rules.

Daniel Aiello, Co-Founder, and CPO of OCR Labs, commented, “The necessity for digital verification is rising exponentially. This previous 12 months we’ve seen extra demand from new sectors as they attempt to navigate the pandemic and an incapacity to function in particular person…Nobody needs to spend hours making an attempt to show who they’re, whether or not it’s for a job or for a checking account, and we additionally wish to know we’re protected in opposition to id theft and fraud. Digital ID verification has a key function to play, however this 12 months we’ve additionally seen the restrictions if hybrid fashions are used. Individuals are a barrier and a threat, however absolutely automated expertise can have a big impact on many industries and privateness. OCR Labs is constructed to be safe, frictionless and quick, and able to recognizing ID paperwork the world over.”

OCR Labs is utilized by recruitment enterprise REED within the UK. Russ Cohn, an early member of the Google UK management workforce, has been appointed OCR’s Normal Supervisor of Worldwide Operations, primarily based out of London.

Cohn commented: “The expertise that Matt and Dan have created is totally automated, so it doesn’t depend on any people behind the scenes. That’s very key in the mean time. We’ve seen how COVID has impacted having that hybrid answer, so automation will increase the velocity and supply of the expertise to our customers… A number of opponents outsource and use totally different distributors to place collectively an answer.”