Onfido, which provides a two-step online identity verification service, raises $100M led by TPG Growth, bringing its total raised to $200M
Contactless transactions have become a major priority at a time when people all around the world are minimising their contact with others outside …
Context & Ripple Effects
Onfido's funding arc has been doubling in size as it climbs the stack: a $25M Series B in 2016 to push background-checking software into the US, a $30M Series C in 2017 backed by Microsoft and Salesforce, then a $50M round co-led by SoftBank Investment and Salesforce Ventures in 2019. This $100M TPG Growth round — taking total raised to $200M — lands in April 2020, when the pandemic is making contactless, remote identity verification a priority for onboarding customers without in-person checks.
TPG Growth's portfolio of consumer marketplaces (Airbnb, Uber, Spotify) gives Onfido a backer whose other companies are exactly the kind of platforms that need to verify strangers at scale.
First-order effects
- Onfido gets $100M to scale its two-step AI identity verification at the moment demand for remote, contactless onboarding spikes, doubling its total raised to $200M.
- TPG Growth adds a verification vendor alongside its Airbnb, Spotify, and Uber holdings — companies whose marketplaces depend on trusting unknown users.
Second-order effects
- The round sets a capital bar for the identity-verification category: Payfone raises $100M of its own two months later for phone-based identity, while Persona's $17.5M Series A shows the gap between the category's leaders and its early-stage challengers widening.
- Salesforce and Microsoft, both prior Onfido investors, see the platform they backed double down — reinforcing identity verification as an enterprise-software attach rather than a niche compliance tool.
Third-order effects
- If the funding cadence holds, identity verification consolidates into a trust-infrastructure layer — proof of personhood sold as a service — with a few well-capitalized platforms (Onfido, Payfone) and compliance-focused regional players like OCR Labs competing underneath them.
The trend: Identity verification is scaling from a compliance feature into core trust infrastructure for marketplaces and enterprises, with round sizes doubling as contactless onboarding becomes the default.