Revenues and customer growth increased 6x in the last 12 months as GMO VenturePartners adds $4.5m to existing $12m series A. Bureau eyes strategic partnership with GMO Payment Gateway and acquires YC backed identity verification startup inVOID to enhance its global coverage, widen its IP scope and broaden its tech stack. 

As businesses around the world expand and grow, they seek to understand who their customers are and if they can trust them. Helping them on this journey, fraud and identity decisioning platform Bureau is today announcing an additional $4.5m from GMO VenturePartners, GMO Payment Gateway, and existing investors to complete its series A funding round at $16.5m. With the completion of the latest round, total funding for the startup has reached $20.5m to date.

Founded in 2020, Bureau is a global identity decisioning platform for fraud prevention and compliance management. Businesses use the Bureau risk orchestration platform to manage compliance, and prevent fraud for their entire customer journey. Today the company serves customers across banking, fintech, insurance, the gig economy, and real money gaming among others. Bureau has increased customer and revenue numbers 6x in the last 12 months, with over 300m identities verified through its platform. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in India, Singapore, and Dubai

Bureau is the brainchild of Ranjan Reddy, who earlier founded payments startup Qubecell in Asia that was later acquired by Boku and Ranjan served as Chief Business Officer at Boku Identity (latterly acquired by Twilio). Bureau is the culmination of Ranjan’s two decades experience in innovating the customer journey and the start of a source of truth for a network of verified identities.

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“We founded Bureau to build a single source of digital trust, ” said Ranjan Reddy, CEO and founder of Bureau. “Our identity decisioning platform is purpose-built to orchestrate massive, disparate data to recognise, structure, and amplify risk signals in milliseconds so that customers can reach an absolute decision in real time. The outcome is material. Working with us, companies know who their consumers are, who they say they are and that they have good intentions, while consumers know their digital identities and privacy are safe and secure.”

In addition to the funding round, Bureau has completed the acquisition of inVOID, a YC-backed identity verification startup and agreed a strategic partnership with GMO Payment Gateway. Bureau intends to leverage this to enhance its global coverage, widen its IP scope and broaden its tech stack.

Ranjan Reddy added: “Compliance regulations are no longer limited to the banking sector. Nearly every sector – gig economy, crypto, gaming, ecommerce – faces regulations, some for the very first time. But companies cannot just rely on compliance. They need to know whether a digital identity, and their transaction is really who they say they are. So compliance + fraud prevention from one source, in the form of a trust network is highly valuable. This acquisition does just that. It adds to the distinct strengths of our device intelligence, behavioral AI, and no-code decisioning platform and brings additional KYC and compliance workflows to our real-time, AI-based capabilities. The synergies are a game-changer for companies because for the first time they have a clear view into whether a digital identity is trustworthy all orchestrated from a single platform.”

Gartner estimates that Cyber fraud will cost the world $1T annually by 2025 and it’s unsurprising that the market for fraud detection and prevention platforms is expected to reach $142B by 2028. 73% of this expenditure is borne by companies in the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance sectors today.

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Looking at the current fraud scenario, Ryu Muramatsu, Director/Founding Partner at GMO VenturePartners Inc. commented: “Ranjan and his team have displayed vision-market fit and have demonstrated the credentials it takes to succeed in the fraud and risk mitigation space. We are honored to back them and partner with them to take their identity decisioning platform for fraud prevention and compliance management globally. As an investor on both debt and equity sides, it’s clear to us that Fraud prevention is a key priority for Fintechs today and Bureau is in a great position to become the market leader in this space.”

Bureau is a modern no-code fraud, and identity decisioning platform. It delivers accurate conclusions about the trustworthiness of digital identities to prevent fraud and ease compliance, resulting in seamless digital journeys for legitimate customers. The single AI-architected platform provides banks, fintech, gaming, gig economy and e-commerce companies with the complete range of identity verification, fraud prevention and detection, and risk and compliance solutions. Its Identity Bureau network supplies customers with a feedback loop about digital identities based on contextualized linkages.

GMO VenturePartners is an early and growth stage investment subsidiary of GMO Internet Group, one of the most comprehensive providers of industry-leading Internet services in Japan. The firm has a strong presence in supporting startups from EC, payment, ad-tech and enterprise SAAS sectors in regions such as Japan, China, Vietnam, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and the US. GMO VenturePartners Inc has invested in over 50 startups over the past years and eight companies went public.

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