Insights

Companies to Watch in 2022

1/12/2022

By:Travis Jarae, Jennie Berry, and Cameron D’Ambrosi

We recently outlined several key trends across a few notable solution segments in this year’s prediction blog. When breaking down those trends, we found ourselves referencing specific companies over and over again. While this is not an exhaustive list of companies doing amazing things in the identity industry, it is the list of 14 growth companies, 8 startups, and 3 companies that threatened us (you know who you are) that we believe will represent the industry in 2022.

Note - Startups (S) are defined here as companies founded after 2017 and have at least 3 customers.

Company	Bio	Why We're Watching
	Founded in 2015, Alloy was one of the first platforms to market, offering an orchestration layer combining multiple world-class KYC, AML, and identity data sets into a simple API. Since then, they’ve expanded this approach beyond onboarding to offer both transaction monitoring and credit underwriting solutions.	Orchestration, it’s not just for customer onboarding. We are watching Alloy closely in 2022 as they begin to deploy some of their recent $100MM fundraise and jump headfirst into the credit decisioning market with the same elegant workflows and pre-built integrations that saw them hit unicorn status in 2021.
	Founded in 2012, Callsign seeks to solve the challenges of user onboarding and authentication with a full-stack identity solution that orchestrates myriad user and device signals to empower low-friction experiences for trusted users while identifying and neutralizing threat actors.	We remain excited by Callsign’s customer-centric approach towards solving complex fraud and account takeover threats with an elegant and transparent user experience. This year, Callsign expanded into APAC with a new HQ in Singapore. With “orchestration” set to remain a key buzzword for 2022, look for Callsign to make headlines as enterprises seek to continue reducing customer friction across user channels.
(S)	Founded in 2019 by Dan Pinto and Valentin Vasilyev, and recently funded by Nexus Venture Partners, FingerprintJS offers a simple solution to a fundamental fraud question for all organizations: have I seen this user before?	Shutting down fraudsters without layering frustrating amounts of friction on good users is on every product manager's wish list for Santa Claus. FingerprintJS APIs enable developers to build fraud detection capabilities directly into their platforms with zero impact on user experience and more than 99% accuracy.
	Founded in 2010 as a SaaS-based identity resolution platform focused on marketing applications, FullContact has since expanded its product offerings across the customer lifecycle to support onboarding and fraud use cases.	With third-party cookies set to (finally) die in 2022, FullContact is at the vanguard of companies leveraging their marketing expertise to forge new opportunities in digital identity. Look for FullContact to turn heads in the digital identity space as they continue to unlock the power of their identity graph and network to solve new customer challenges.
	Founded in 2010 by Blake Hall, ID.me started by providing verification services to the military community, which has since expanded to over 64 million members. ID.me’s identity proofing capabilities have been recognized as a gold standard for NIST 800-63-3 IAL2 / AAL2 credential service providers. The company has established a foothold in the federal sector as a trusted identity verification solution for the DMV for issuing driver’s licenses and over the past year, ID.me has continued to expand its offerings from pandemic-related unemployment benefits and COVID passports to prescription medication access and travel discounts.	In 2021, ID.me became another identity unicorn with a $1.5B valuation and an additional $100MM in financing from Fortress Investment Group. This comes on the heels of the company solidifying new partnerships across 6 federal agencies and 27 states to improve civilian identity. ID.me is steadily growing traction in both federal and private sector applications, across both B2B and B2C use cases, gaining the attention of businesses and consumers alike. We expect to see ID.me continue improving what many consider to be the largest Personal Identity Ecosystem (‘PIE’) in the US.
(S)	Led by Founder and CEO André Ferraz, and originally founded as a Brazilian location-based marketing platform, Incognia launched its US operations in 2020 with a pivot to zero-friction authentication and account takeover protection.	Sensing a trend? Raising the level of assurance about who is behind a transaction without requiring any effort from the user is the next competitive battleground. Incognia offers the ability to fast-track good users and flag account-takeover attempts, while preserving user privacy and without requiring access to sensitive mobile network operator location data.
	Founded in 2011, iProov offers a full suite of liveness detection, user authentication, and verification products powered by proprietary facial and palm biometric recognition technology.	Accelerated both by COVID, and the increasing consumer shift towards mobile channels across industries, liveness detection capabilities were the hot commodity of 2021. With several segment players coming off the board via M&A, look for iProov to fight for dominance in a segment with just a handful of competitive solutions.
	Founded in 2010, Jumio survived the challenging, formative years of the digital identity industry to emerge as one of the world’s largest identity verification platforms. With blue-chip clients across banking, online-to-offline platforms, fintech and travel, Jumio now processes over 1MM identity verifications a day.	Jumio’s December 2021 acquisition of 4Stop is illustrative of their continued push to own the full breadth of the consumer digital identity lifecycle as eIDs and identity networks gain adoption. Look for Jumio to keep moving beyond the onboarding moment in time to seize opportunities in ongoing transaction monitoring and fraud detection, and across new verticals and geographies.
	Founded in 2012 as a computer vision startup, Microblink has emerged as a leading OCR, document scanning, and identity verification platform used across industries worldwide.	With technology that helps to power billions of digital transactions a year globally, Microblink has quietly built one of the world’s largest digital identity networks. We’re watching closely in 2022 as they seek to continue strong growth and expand into new verticals.
(S)	Founded in 2018 by two former early Checkr employees, Kyle Mack and Kurt Ruppel, and backed by big-time VCs Accel and Sequoia, Middesk focuses on building tools for businesses that need to manage risk and compliance at scale.	Simply put, Middesk solves real problems business managers can relate to. Whether that is verifying your business information for the 100th time this month or not missing another state filing deadline (which the CEO of our company knows too much about), Middesk is building the tools to help. In addition to building practical products, the company took a ground-up approach to KYB and is now setting the standard for the industry.
(S)	Founded in early 2021 by two former Telesign executives, Pierre Demarche and Ravish Patel, Monnai is seeking to disrupt fintech and credit decisioning through a single API platform, by leveraging common and disparate alternate data sources from around the world.	The founding team has over a decade of experience building data pipelines and AI technologies around the world. When you couple their experience with the importance of credit decisioning and the growth of the fintech ecosystem in 2022, you end up with a potential rocket ship.
	Founded in 2010, MX is a fintech data platform that aims to help seamlessly connect users with their financial data and help to unlock both greater value and insights through automation, efficiency, and transparency.	MX sits at the intersection of multiple digital identity trends, serving both as an enabler of new advances in credit and financial identity, while also building out a powerful digital identity network. We are keen to see how MX can leverage the confluence of these two powerful opportunities in 2022.
	Brought together by a blockbuster $8.1B merger, the combination of NortonLifeLock and Avast establishes a consumer cybersecurity behemoth with over 500MM total global users. Featuring products across the consumer antivirus, password manager, and identity theft protection market segments.	Avast’s December 2021 acquisition of Evernym portends an exciting digital identity-centric future for the newly-minted consumer cybersecurity king. With our prediction of increased global focus on the development of digital identity networks, we’re watching NortonLifeLock/Avast closely to see how they leverage their half-billion global users in launching a digital identity product.
(S)	Founded in 2017 by Matthew Gregory and Mrinal Wadhwa, and backed by investors including Craft Ventures, Future Ventures and Okta Ventures. Ockam’s core vision is to serve as the trust framework underpinning connected devices and cloud services across the globe.	Connectivity without trust is a poisoned chalice. With billions of connected devices coming online by the month, Ockam is forging the tools that enable the data integrity, security, and privacy organizations require to succeed in an increasingly distributed computing environment.
	Founded in 2009, Okta blazed a new path in identity and access management apart from the big tech old guard. By leveraging a modular approach, Okta helps its customers put identity first without sacrificing user experience or security. The company, which IPO’d in 2017 at over a $6B valuation, helps make identity both tangible, and digestible, for both SMBs and Fortune 50 enterprises alike.	At the time of writing this article, Okta (NASDAQ: OKTA) is trading near a 52-week low although we are bullish on Okta’s ability to expand as a leading workforce and consumer IAM solution into adjacent solution segments of their choice, such as identity proofing. On the heels of the $6.5B acquisition of Auth0 in 2021, we expect Okta to continue its push towards participation in every facet of the consumer digital identity lifecycle.
	Founded in 2012 to serve the growing need for online-to-offline platform identity verification in the UK, Onfido now boasts a global footprint and a broad cross-industry customer base. Backed by investors including TPG Growth and Salesforce Ventures, Onfido recently hit the $100MM ARR milestone in 2021, driven by 100% YoY revenue growth.	Locked in a battle with other leading global IDV platforms, we expect Onfido to make headlines in 2022 as the competitive landscape expands to adjacent market segments, including fraud/risk scoring and authentication. While they were relatively quiet on the M&A front in 2021, we do not expect this to be the case in 2022 as buyers continue to demand full-stack solutions.
(S)	Founded in 2018 by a team of VCs and private investors who know the pain associated with investor accreditation. Over the past year, Parallel Markets has seen rapid adoption of its accreditation product with 50+ enterprise clients. Recently they launched their identity platform product, which helps financial platforms onboard individuals and businesses, perform AML checks, and in turn, enables verified users with access to their verified account through the Parallel Passport.	The team, led by Tony Peccatiello, Nick Goss, Biran Muller, and industry veteran Suzanne Elovic, knows the problem first-hand, has experience operating in the space, and is ahead of the curve with targeting Web3 compliance issues.
	Founded in 2008 as Payfone, Prove’s “Phone-Centric Identity” platform leverages the power of mobile and device intelligence to support both low-friction customer onboarding, fraud detection, and account takeover protection use cases.	With a full roster of blue-chip customers, and over 1B consumer and business identities under management, Prove’s identity network has few peers in the market today. We’re watching to see how they leverage core strength in financial services to take on new verticals and use cases.
	Founded in 2012 by Johnny Ayers, Socure was an early pioneer in adapting identity verification to the rapidly-evolving needs of the Fintech sector. Nearly ten years later, they’re a leading player in digital onboarding, helping four of the five largest US banks and seven of the top ten credit card issuers meet their needs for KYC that minimizes both fraud risk and user friction.	Socure was on an absolute tear in 2021, raising a blockbuster $450MM Series E round that saw their valuation nearly quadruple to $4.5B. Driving this valuation is the fact that they sit at the critical intersection of nearly all of our market trends for 2022. From opportunities in financial identity and eID to business identity verification, keep an eye on Socure in 2022.
	Founded in 2005 as a global Communications as a Service platform, TeleSign is now at the vanguard of a segment-wide transition from offering telecom network signals to digital identity intelligence. Currently owned by Proximus Group, TeleSign recently announced its intention to go public in 2022 via a merger with the North Atlantic Acquisition Corporation SPAC.	TeleSign is a leading example of a platform embracing an opportunity to put digital identity at the front and center of their business. Leveraging a core strength in fostering billions of touchpoints a year with consumer mobile devices, look for TeleSign to compete across the consumer identity lifecycle in both onboarding and account integrity in 2022.
(S)	Founded in 2019 by Riley Hughes, Michael Boyd, and Tomislav Markovski, Trinsic offers full-stack verifiable credential services that can be integrated into existing systems or built custom by use case.	SSI companies focused on building identity wallets for the handful of privacy-conscious individuals who have had difficulties gaining meaningful traction in the market. Learning from the mistakes of the early startups, Trinsic enables companies of all sizes to build applications using verifiable credentials rather than focusing on just their own digital identity wallet.
	Founded in 2011, Trulioo offers its customers a single API connection to access identity data from over 400 data sources across 195 countries. Trulioo’s global identity marketplace additionally offers document-based verification, as well as legal entity verification data.	Having reached unicorn status in 2021 courtesy of a $394MM Series D round led by TCV, Trulioo is targeting aggressive growth in 2022. We’re watching Trulioo’s continued push into business and entity verification, as this previously underserved market heats up driven by digital transformation across every layer of the B2B transaction lifecycle.
	Founded in 2007 to serve the Brazilian market’s growing demand for biometrics, Unico offers a full suite of online and in-person identity verification, customer onboarding, and fraud detection tools.	Unico remains at the forefront of the wave of innovation emerging from Brazil, one of the most challenging markets for combating fraud across the digital identity lifecycle. Bolstered by newly-minted unicorn status courtesy of $110MM in Series C funding from General Atlantic and SoftBank, look for Unico to make headlines in 2022 with strong growth and an accelerated acquisition strategy.
(S)	Founded in 2019 by a team of eCommerce experts led by Ryan Shaw, UK’s VerifyMyAge (or VMA), is a leading age assurance provider supporting global platforms like eBay, Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce.	From retailing age-restricted goods like alcohol and cannabis to meeting new regulatory requirements like the UK’s Age Assurance Design Code, age assurance is poised to become a massive market in 2022. VerifyMyAge has set itself apart by offering platforms a full menu of age assurance tools and technologies, tailoring the level of friction required to meet a customer’s given level of assurance while remaining compliant with a patchwork of global standards.
	Founded in 2014 by Robin Tombs, Yoti is a consumer app offering users a secure digital identity credential, fully in their control. Yoti continues to expand its identity verification and identity proofing capabilities into highly relevant use cases including age estimation, retail age-restricted purchases, and COVID passports.	Yoti is one of the more notable companies leading the charge in the UK for age estimation and assurance. As social media companies and streaming platforms come under fire as ill-equipped to determine whether their users are of age, Yoti continues to roll out solutions that satisfy emerging regulatory requirements. Unsatisfied with the status quo, Yoti is reinventing the applications for existing technology, most recently exploring ways to reduce bias in facial recognition algorithms.