London-based digital identity verification startup OCR Labs raises €26.4M to expand in North America and EMEA

London-headquartered OCR Labs, a digital ID verification business that provides frictionless customer on-boarding, data security, and protection against fraud, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $30M (approx €26.4M) in its Series B round of funding led by New York-based Equable Capital.

After its Series A funding in 2021, OCR Labs continued to scale into the UK and European markets. The company has raised $46M through its combined Series A and B rounds. Previous investors include OYAK and Halkin Ventures.

Funds to expand in Europe

With the raised capital, OCR Labs will expand its team in North America and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa). The company is looking to accelerate its international growth with a new office in North America, a direct sales force and hiring a global Chief Revenue Officer.

John Myers, CEO of OCR Labs, says, “2021 was an incredible year for OCR Labs, with continued validation from customers who have chosen us as their provider for online digital identity verification. This investment provides us with the capital to continue our growth while bringing a value-added investor to our board. The market opportunity continues to grow, and with our expansion in the US, and investment in our global sales effort, we’re in a phenomenal position to grow our customer base.”

“Our vision remains unchanged: we strive to be the leading technology provider of digital identity verification, globally,” adds Myers.

Protecting users from identity fraud

OCR Labs was founded in 2016 by Matthew Adams and Daniel Aiello, and launched its first product in 2018. The founders wanted to streamline customer onboarding while protecting organisations against the increasing risk of fraud and identity theft. Although the company was founded in Australia, it is now headquartered in London.

OCR Labs’ technology is an accredited, biometric solution that combines optical character recognition (OCR), document fraud assessment, liveness detection, video fraud assessment, and face matching. The solution supports Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations, and improves customer identity verification while reducing fraud.

The company claims that it is the only provider with deep learning engines that allows it to control the entire identity verification flow without human intervention. The founders invested in developing this technology after identifying issues in the market that included the use of document templates and higher error rates with different skin tones from existing solutions.

According to a statement, OCR Labs verifies users in seconds with just their ID and a smartphone – from anywhere in the world. “We verify more than 15,000 documents in over 230 countries and principalities – more than any other identity verification provider.”

The company supports clients across industries including financial services, government, telco, crypto, and a variety of platform-based businesses, including SaaS providers. Some of its customers include the Australian Government, Vodafone, ZIP, and BMW.

OCR Labs says that the past year has seen its customer base grow substantially, with a 500 per cent increase in new clients and doubling its growth rate every year in the last three years.