Brazilian startup idwall raises $10M for biometric selfie onboarding as Mitek reports 33 percent growth

Brazilian biometric selfie and ID check startup idwall has raised $10 million in Series B funding to pursue the onboarding market in Latin America, Crunchbase reports.

The funding round was led by Qualcomm Ventures, in its first venture into Latin America, and brings the company’s total raised to $16.5 million.

According to Crunchbase, online fraud and identity theft cost Brazil $15 billion a year, and the country is second in the world for most such crimes.

Idwall provides facial recognition, background check, and optical character recognition technologies through its APIs, meeting compliance requirements which have recently increased significantly in Brazil. It verifies personal documents, searches public and private databases, and the company claims onboarding takes less than three minutes. It also provides the MeuID digital wallet to store all necessary documents and credentials. Target customers include fintech, marketplace, and sharing economy companies.

Qualcomm Senior Director Alexandre Villela said it will work with idwall “on ways they can leverage Qualcomm mobile platforms, with on-device AI processing, to make their solutions run faster and with greater efficiency.”

“Our goal is to create trusting relationships in the digital age, especially in Latin America, where it is such a big problem,” says Lincoln Ando, who co-founded idwall with Raphael Melo in 2016.

Mitek reports major gains for 2019

Fourth quarter revenues for Mitek increased by 19 percent on a year-over-year basis to $25 million in what the company says has been a record quarter, driving the company to a full-year gain of 33 percent in revenue and 57 percent in non-GAAP net income.

GAAP net income in the quarter was $3.3 million, or $0.08 per diluted share, and GAAP net loss for the year was $0.7 million, or $0.02 per diluted share. Full year cash flow from operations was $14.3 million, and the company has $34.8 million in cash and investments.

Mitek reached the practical break-even point by GAAP net in Q3.

Mitek has also announced the appointment of Donna Wells, who was formerly Mindflash CEO and President and Mint.com CMO, to its Board of Directors.

“2019 was another outstanding fiscal year for Mitek and our second consecutive year with record revenues for each quarter,” comments Mitek CEO Max Carnechia. “Our strong performance, driven by continued customer growth from both our mobile deposit and identity verification products, emphasizes the momentum in the digital economy for solutions that empower trust and convenience. Mitek is outpacing the market growth for identity verification and we are seeing a significant uplift in financial services adopting our technology to help them capture more good new customers in the onboarding process.”

For fiscal 2020, Mitek is forecasting revenues of between $98 and $102 million, or growth of between 16 and 21 percent.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  financial results  |  funding  |  identity verification  |  idwall  |  KYC  |  Mitek