ID verification platform Bureau bumps its Series A to $16.5M

In addition to its new funding, it also announced the acquisition of inVOID, a Y Combinator-backed identity verification startup, and entered a strategic partnership with GMO Payment Gateway.Founded in 2020, Bureau is headquartered in California, with teams in Dubai and India. Sectors served by Bureau include banking, fintech, insurance, the gig economy and real money gaming.Before founding Bureau, co-founder and CEO Ranjan Reddy started mobile billing aggregator Qubecell, which was sold to mobile payments company Boku in 2013. Reddy explained that Bureau maps out a digital person, including mobile numbers, emails, devices and IPs, and also a physical identity based on document verification, OCR, Facematch, biometric, info from government databases or database/AML checks. The risk factor of an identity is then assessed based on how many links there are and what type, including indications of past fraudulent activities.Some examples of how Bureau has been used is by banks and neobanks to prevent mule accounts and synthetic ID detection at onboarding. Some fintech organizations have used Bureaus anti-fraud software to detect account takeover.Reddy said one way Bureau differentiates from other identity management platforms is that it is not a data broker.