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Companies to Watch in 2023

02/21/23
Travis Jarae
Travis Jarae
Liminal CEO

We are excited to share our list of Companies to Watch in 2023. We’ve identified several trends that will shape the business landscape in the coming year. 

  • Market consolidation is one notable trend, as larger companies seek to acquire or invest in smaller, innovative startups.
  • Another trend is the increasing importance of consumer digital identity, as individuals and businesses rely on digital platforms to access goods and services. 
  • Finally, reusable identity solutions are gaining popularity as a way to improve security while streamlining the user experience.

In this blog, we highlight ten companies that are on the cutting edge of these trends and will have a significant impact in the coming year. These companies provide cutting-edge solutions in digital identity, fintech, and cybersecurity, and are carefully chosen for their strong leadership, unique business models, and future growth potential. We hope you enjoy learning about these exciting businesses and the impact they will have in the coming year.

Liminal Top Companies to Watch in 2023
CompanyBioWhy We’re Watching
 Yoti, founded in 2014 by Robin Tombs, Duncan Francis, and Noel Hayden, has emerged as the market leader in age verification. The company has discovered the carrot that will entice both businesses and adults to protect children’s identities online. Yoti doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon, with over 12 million app downloads worldwide and a suite of business solutions spanning identity verification, age estimation, e-signature, and AI anti-spoofing technology.Online child protection is becoming as crucial as privacy for many Big Tech companies, and Yoti’s success in 2023 will be a good proxy for assessing the commercial viability of age-based solutions.
 Officially rebranded in late 2022, Gen is the largest and most recognizable consumer-focused security and identity protection brand. While their core products exhibit small but steady YoY growth, the Digital Trust Services unit has us most excited. Led by the former CEO of Avast, Ondřej Vlček, and the team and technology from SecureKey and Evernym, the DTS unit has a real opportunity to change the game with 400 million+ users. Given the size of the opportunity for Reusable Identity, we are eager to see how the team goes to market, what products they launch, and what business models they implement. Gen’s activities will serve as a good test case for future commercialization of consumer digital identity products.
 Founded in 2011 by Anna Sainsbury and David Briggs, GeoComply is the leader in geolocation services for the iGaming industry. Top investors like Blackstone, Arctos, Norwest, and Atairos gave the company a significant boost in 2022 because of its proven track record in fraud prevention and compliance. We anticipate that the business will start concentrating on its other major verticals: financial services, cryptocurrencies, and media & entertainment, now that it has a substantial war chest, a sizable market share in the gaming industry, and a strong proprietary product suite.Geolocation is hardly a new technology; GPS has been available for commercial use for more than 40 years, and WiFi and Bluetooth technologies are omnipresent in our daily lives. What is new, relatively speaking, is the ability to extract location data, analyze it, and turn it into actionable information – geolocation intelligence. When we polled more than 125 industry leaders last year through the Liminal Answer Network, they said geolocation intelligence was the second most important product feature to include in their stack after first-party PII. Adopting GeoComply’s technology will help prevent more fraud, enable higher assurance use cases on mobile devices, and give us new insights on how to use old technologies to solve new challenges.
 Alloy, founded in 2015 by Thommy Nicholas, Laura Spiekerman, and Charles Hearn, has quickly become a crossover event star in the digital identity, RegTech, fraud, and fintech communities. The company has developed one of the most effective onboarding and transaction monitoring tools for fintechs, assisting teams in automating identity and risk decisions, meeting KYC/KYB and AML requirements, and making credit underwriting decisions. The team has timed the private equity markets perfectly, raising a significant amount of capital from leading growth equity investors including Avenir, Bessemer Ventures, Canapi, and Lightspeed Ventures.Based on our preliminary findings from our member research on Integrated Identity Platforms, we believe Alloy will be a leader in this industry in the future. The company has a particularly powerful product, a strong brand, committed investors, and a global network of partners. While the core orchestration product is undeniably successful, it will be interesting to see how the company expands into new product areas with intense competition, such as AML transaction monitoring and credit underwriting.
 Founded in 2011, BioCatch is the market leader in behavioral biometrics solutions for financial institutions. The company has stayed ahead of the competition by developing new products that offer advanced fraud protection via fingerprinting, network analysis, and insights into how people behave. Although the company’s management has changed in recent months, BioCatch has positive unit economics, which should position the company for growth in 2023.If the goal in 2022 was to solve for onboarding users and preventing fraud attacks with as little friction as possible, the goal in 2023 is to do the same – with no friction at all. According to product managers at leading technology companies, behavioral biometrics are among the most exciting technologies to evaluate this year to improve conversions, prevent fraud, and improve the overall user experience.
 Founded in 2005, 1Password received its first dollar of investment in 2019. Since then, the company has raised more than $920 million. As a market leader in password management, 1password announced an interesting product pivot in 2022, shifting away from passwords in favor of passkeys. With capital reserves on hand, 1Password can be a major driver of the passwordless transition, effectively converting their 15 million+ users, who we assume are people who care about online security, into a sizable batch of early adopters.The transition from username and password to passkeys is more complex than it appears. People, businesses, governments, and consumers must all support it. 1Password correctly read the tea leaves by acknowledging that their business model is being disrupted, shifting their product roadmap to support the future, and raising capital to ensure their success. While we don’t believe the password-free era will begin in 2023, we recognize that it must begin somewhere.
 Microsoft has continued to make significant investments in its Microsoft Entra platform, which includes AD, PAM, CIEM, IGA, and DIDs solutions. Microsoft is well-positioned as the manager of your business and personal identities, and it is poised to become a major player in the race for reusable identity management. The company appears to have completed all the necessary steps to allow employers, customers, and partners to create, manage, and revoke/suspend credentials.Microsoft, one of the world’s most valuable companies by market capitalization, has the financial and engineering resources to develop reusable identities linked to a strong network of relying parties. We’re looking forward to seeing which Personal Identity Ecosystems (PIEs) they choose to create, manifest, or join. Which use cases, verticals, or partner opportunities will they prioritize first?
 Turning 15 this year, Prove (formerly Payfone) is a leading mobile-focused identity verification and authentication provider servicing a wide range of industries, including banking, fintech, lending, crypto, eCommerce, and gaming. Given the company’s long history of success, the company has racked up notable marquee clients such as Wells Fargo, Barclays, Coinbase, and PayPal. The diversity of Prove’s customer base gives them a large volume of data signals that help bolster the Prove Identity Network (PIN), which has over 350M keys bound to 185M+ identity tokens.By combining PIN and its PRO Model, Prove has the right ingredients to establish itself as a frontrunner to capturing the $160B+ reusable identity market. Even if the company decides to forgo tackling the reusable identity opportunity directly, they are primed to be a golden cog enabler to any platform. As the battle for positioning continues, 2023 will be the company’s biggest challenge and opportunity.
 Jumio is a leading provider of end-to-end onboarding and transaction monitoring solutions, serving nearly every industry in 200 countries. The KYX Platform, Jumio’s flagship product, is a unified, end-to-end identity verification and eKYC platform that provides various identity proofing services such as ID verification, biometric-based authentication, document verification, government database search, risk signaling, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, and case management.Since launching the KYX Platform in 2020, the company has experienced significant growth, becoming “the company to beat” for many digital identity service providers. Through effective sales and strong product management, the company has continued to defend (and expand) its global position. As the market consolidates in 2023, platforms like Jumio will likely lead the way in M&A, redefining the identity verification market.
 A few heads turned when Thoma Bravo announced the acquisitions of SailPoint (April), Ping (August), and Forgerock (October). While at the time of writing this blog, there is an open inquiry from the DOJ regarding anti-trust, most analysts agree that the deal will close sometime in the first half of 2023. We understand that SailPoint will continue to operate independently. At the same time, ForgeRock and Ping will merge, combining ForgeRock’s open-source IAM solutions with Ping’s enterprise-grade IAM services to make a strong competitor to Okta and Microsoft.The merged company would likely offer a broader range of products and services, such as identity provisioning, access management, and identity governance, as well as advanced features like multi-factor authentication, risk-based access, and user behavior analytics. The resulting platform will cover most of the Liminal Digital Identity Landscape, and any gaps can be quickly filled through partnerships. We’ll keep an eye on this one because it will likely serve as a case study for the next generation of digital identity innovators.

Other notable companies include: 

Crowdstrike

Darktrace

LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Middesk

Okta

OneTrust

Onfido

Parallel Markets

Proofpoint

Socure

Spruce

Square

Stripe

Telesign

VerifyMyAge

While we’ve limited this list to the top 10 companies to watch across the Liminal Digital Identity Landscape based on momentum, product-market fit, and market dynamics, we monitor over 2,000 companies across the globe using our proprietary Link platform. If you’d like to learn more about Link and how you can track companies as we do, contact us today about membership opportunities.

*** Our research team, led by Travis Jarae, independently chose all the companies on the Liminal Companies to Watch in 2023 list. Liminal did not receive any payment to include or exclude any company from the list.

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