Identity management used to mean making sure you had your driver’s license when you left home, but these days it’s not so easy: identity fundamentally underpins the way we engage with the digital world, and identity services can take many forms (and abuses). Now things are getting even more interesting: the breakthroughs we’re seeing in areas like AI raise big questions and challenges about how to prove we’re who we say we are and catch bad guys who exploit vulnerable situations.
On today’s episode of TechDigiPro Live: May 10, 12 pm Pacific Time — we will talk about this and more with Rick Song, the CEO and co-founder of Persona, one of the great unicorn startups that has capitalized on this evolution; and Index Ventures’ Mark Goldberg, a star investor who was an early bet on Persona and has insights into how the verification game is evolving, from a market and investment perspective.
If you’re working on a related startup, or interested in the space, or just wondering what it’s like right now to raise money as a B2B startup, come join us! It’s free to participate.
As Song sees it, most digital companies are not, and do not want to be, experts when it comes to ID management. There are too many moving pieces for it to be a core competency at even the biggest tech companies on the planet; and often submitting the verification process to a dedicated third party for the job is a preferred route to go independently.
“Most of them say, ‘Get this off my hands,’” Song says of the verification task. “They need and would rather have someone else run it.”
That opens the door for companies like Persona to take on and handle that work. It started with an API to verify identity, and has more recently expanded into a broader platform that covers not only this, but also a variety of other verification and identity management solutions, such as tools for its clients to handle sensitive data as part of of your broader service flow, to run fraud detection or risk assessments, and more.
That larger track record, and the major clients Persona has been tapping into, which include some of the biggest names in retail and other consumer services, helped catapult the company to a $1.5 billion valuation in its latest round of funding.
That was in 2021, before the tech finance business took a nosedive. But there’s the argument that companies like Persona may well prove more resilient than others: identity and malicious activity around identity remain important issues in technology, and there’s still a lot to play for in this market.
TechDigiPro Live is free. Join us virtually today at 12:00 pm and add your questions directly in the chat! register here. Do you have a startup? We’d love to have you join us for Pitch Practice, where you’ll have two minutes to introduce the show’s guests and receive four minutes of feedback. It’s fun and useful.
