Sharing economy background checker Onfido has appointed ex-Google director Edward Ungar as its first ever chief commercial officer focused on driving the company’s international expansion.
London-based startup, founded in 2012, recently opened up in the US and Ungar will lead global client relationships out of San Francisco.
The platform is already used by the likes of Deliveroo, Handy and Onefinestay, and even the UK’s NHS, to check the identities of their users at scale.
Ungar was previously Google’s director of channel partnerships for EMEA, looking after the internet giant’s ad clients in Europe.
To help deliver on its ambitious plans, Onfido raised a $4.5m Series A round back in February, which was joined by CrunchFund and Wellington Partners, and it counts Brent Hoberman among its star backers.
“The global sharing economy is fundamentally changing the way people provide goods and services to one another around the globe,” said Husayn Kassai, Onfido’s cofounder and CEO. “It’s important that we invest resources in the US — along with other regions — to meet the unique and growing global market needs.
“Thousands of companies need to thoroughly and efficiently check the backgrounds and identity of the members and contractors who want to work through their platform so as to engender trust among their customers. Ed’s leadership ensures we meet that challenge head-on.”
The company has also appointed Oxford University Professor Philip Torr to its Onfido’s advisory board in order to help develop the machine learning capabilities of its software.