Identity verification firm Payfone raises $100m

Payfone announced it has raised $100 million to acquire strategic assets, further strengthen its machine learning capabilities, and build a cross-industry consortium to secure digital transactions and experiences.

The investment was led by funds advised by Apax Digital, the growth equity team of Apax Partners.

Payfone’s customer identity platform enables the world’s largest financial institutions, healthcare organisations and technology companies to bring speed and security to their onboarding, digital servicing and call centre processes.

Payfone’s authentication solutions, including its unique Trust Score tool, are built on ten years of proprietary phone intelligence that enable Payfone to anonymously measure a phone number’s reputation and risk with real-time processing of behavioural signals.

Payfone’s platform instantly detects burner phones, spoofed calls, real-time SIM swap fraud, and synthetic identities, while removing friction from legitimate transactions. Payfone also provides call verification solutions that run passively in the background of a phone call, allowing faster issue resolution.

Rodger Desai, CEO of Payfone, said, “The mobile phone is rapidly becoming the secure passport for navigating our digital lives. With one in three US consumers already authenticated by Payfone, this investment accelerates our ability to set the standard for the authentication process. As we build out a cross-industry consortium, more enterprises will be able to access Payfone’s real-time fraud and risk signals to prevent account takeovers while passing more transactions.”

Daniel O’Keefe, Managing Partner of Apax Digital said, “Identity is the key enabling technology for the next generation of digital businesses. Payfone’s Trust Score™ is core to the real-time decisioning that enterprises need in order to drive revenue while thwarting fraud and protecting privacy.”

Zach Fuchs, Principal of Apax Digital added, “Payfone’s technology enables frictionless customer experience, while curbing the mounting operating expense caused by manual review.”

Joining the investment round are new investors Sandbox Insurtech Ventures and Ralph de la Vega, the former Vice Chairman of AT&T. Existing investors MassMutual Ventures, Synchrony, Blue Venture Fund, Wellington Management LLP, and former CEO of LexisNexis Andrew Prozes also participated.