Digital identity management and verification startup Jumio Corp. said today it has secured financing for its next stage of growth, a $150 million investment from private equity firm Great Hill Partners.

Jumio said it’s the single largest funding round to date in the digital identity space. The company said it highlights the growing importance businesses are placing on the need to remotely establish their customer’s digital identities, in order to defend against fraud and other financial crimes and comply with Know Your Customer and other regulations.

Jumio is one of the original players in the digital identity market. It was founded back in 2010, and its main offering is a digital ID verification service that can quickly authenticate documents such as passports and driving licenses over the web. The company claims to have pioneered the “selfie + ID” approach to establish people’s credentials online quickly. In addition, its platform offers transaction monitoring and anti-money-laundering services to help businesses ensure they stay in compliance and protect against fraud.

The company has endured a bumpy ride to get where it is today, though. Back in early 2016, it was forced to enter bankruptcy because of what it said at the time were “certain legacy issues combined with related government investigations and proceedings” that meant it couldn’t secure the funding it needed to stay in business.

Jumio exited bankruptcy that same year, however, after being bought out by Facebook Inc. co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who was an early investor in the company. Later that year it secured $15 million in funding to demonstrate that it was back on track.

Fast-forward five years and with the COVID-19 pandemic now a permanent fixture in people’s lives, things are definitely looking up for Jumio. The company said its services have proved to be especially popular over the last year as more people do business transactions online.

It claims to have achieved record revenues and volumes during 2020, though it didn’t provide specifics. It has been building out the services it offers too. Last year for example it launched its Jumio Go offering, which is an entirely automated version of its offering. And in September it launched its new KYX Platform that combines data from a variety of sources to build a complete digital profile of online users.

“Jumio’s innovations helped establish the identity verification market more than 10 years ago, and the need to establish someone’s digital identity remotely has never been greater,” said Jumio Chief Executive Robert Prigge.

Jumio said that as part of today’s investment, Great Hill Partner’s Nick Cayer and Matt Vettel will join its board of directors. Cayer said in a statement he’s backing Jumio because the need for online identity verification, fraud detection and compliance has never been greater. “Organizations must digitally transform their onboarding, KYC and AML monitoring processes, which have become even more vital as the volume of online and mobile payments reaches historic highs,” he said.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Jumio’s funding round is a positive sign for a digital identification technology market that has remained somewhat elusive up until now.

“Digital identification has not fully delivered yet due to the demands of security and ubiquity that a modern digital society has,” Mueller said. “But there has been progress and of course any further progress requires research and development, which in turn requires capital.”

Jumio said it plans to use the new funds to accelerate its lead in digital identity. To do that, it’s planning to devote more resources toward automating its identity verification tools. In addition, it plans to expand the reach of its Jumio KYX Platform and its suite of AML compliance services.

“To further advance Jumio Go we will be adding additional fraud checks to ensure the ID is valid, as well as expanding coverage to include new countries and ID types,” Prigge said. “Our hybrid offering, which combines automated identity proofing plus human verification, already supports more than 4,000 ID types across 200 countries, so we’ll be advancing Jumio Go to match that more closely.”

Image: Jumio