European Investment Bank leads €15 million investment in Munich-based identity verification startup IDnow

We covered IDnow a little over a year ago when the Luxembourg-based tech startup raised $40M in funding to accelerate the growth of its Identity Verification-as-a-Service (IVaaS) platform. IDnow has experienced exponential growth since our last article. As a sign of confidence in the company’s direction, more investors are jumping on board to invest in the company.

Today, the Munich, Germany-based IDnow announced it has received €15 million in growth funding from The European Investment Bank (EIB). The new investment will be used to primarily support its research and development (R&D) activities as well as its international growth.

This operation is part of the European Growth Finance Facility (EGFF), a product under the guarantee scheme of the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI). The EGFF is designed to address quasi-equity gaps linked to structural market failures across the European Union in the provision of adequate risk capital to late-stage, venture-backed companies. Such European small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and mid-caps often suffer from systemic shortages of large, non-dilutive financing options for growth investments, both tangible and intangible. The benefit of EFSI in this specific case is the clear enhancement of the risk capacity of the Bank.

EFSI is the central pillar of the Investment Plan for Europe under which the EIB and the European
Commission are working together as strategic partners and the EIB’s financing operations are boosting the competitiveness of the European economy. It is accompanied by the advisory service, the European Investment Advisory Hub, which enables public and private project operators to structure their investment projects more professionally.

Commenting on the funding, EIB Vice-President Ambroise Fayolle, who is responsible for EFSI and the bank´s operations in Germany, said: “IDnow, a first-time borrower for the Bank, depends on significant R&D and marketing investments related to commercialization. The transaction is an excellent example of how the EU bank, with the support of the Investment Plan for Europe, can facilitate the development of innovation, in particular in sensitive policy areas such as anti-money laundering, counter-terrorist financing, and cybersecurity, which are of utmost importance for the European Union and its economy.”

Founded in 2014 by Armin Bauer, Dennis von Ferenczy, Felix Haas, and Sebastian Baerhold, IDnow provides advanced machine-learning technology for its Identity-as-a-Service platform that can verify in real-time. IDnow’s unmanipulable identity verification is used across industries conducting online customer interactions that require a high degree of security. IDnow uses artificial intelligence to check all security features on ID documents and can, therefore, reliably identify forged documents. Potentially, the identities of more than 7 billion customers from 193 different countries can be verified in real-time. In addition to safety, the focus is also on an uncomplicated application for the customer.

Since its inception in 2014, IDnow has grown and integrated its portfolio of identity products onto a single platform, serving as a highly effective solution across different sectors and jurisdictions. Corsair’s investment will support IDnow as it expands its product range and captures greater market share throughout Europe, with immediate plans to open new offices in France and the UK.