Digital identity verification service OCR Labs scans in $30 million

London-headquartered OCR Labs has secured $30 million in a Series B funding round. The Australian-founded company delivers customer on-boarding, data security, and fraud protection services, ultimately upping authentic customer identity verifications and lowering fraud. The new funding will be used to drive further expansion into both North American and EMEA markets. To date, OCR Labs has raised $46 million.

Highlighting the dire need for digital identity verification services, according to a Juniper Research study, “revenue for digital identity vendors will exceed $53 billion globally in 2026; doubling from $26 billion in 2021.” A statistic that has helped the startup see a 500 percent increase in clients over the past year, with names such as the Australian Government, Vodafone, ZIP, and BMW all employing OCR Labs’ technologies.

With a proprietary biometric solution that combines optical character recognition (OCR), document fraud assessment, liveness detection, video fraud assessment, and face matching, the company claims to be, “the only provider with unique deep learning engines that allows it to control the entire identity verification flow without human intervention.”

However, crosstown rival iProov recently landed $70 million, has 12 granted patents, a customer list that includes the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the UK Home Office, and the ​​Australian Taxation Office, and reported several days in 2021 that saw upwards of 1 million verifications completed in a single day.

OCR Labs’ $30 million Series B round was led by Equable Capital, a New York-based family office founded by Jonathan Smidt, former partner at KKR.

“Our investment in OCR Labs was the culmination of a lot of work to find the leading provider of identity verification using identity documents and facial matching. OCR Labs’ solution has the highest accuracy and lowest error rates while protecting customer data and privacy and meeting the highest third-party testing and accreditations standards,” commented Smidt.