People’s Champion finalist 2016: Onfido

Start-up name: Onfido
Founders: Eamon Jubbawy, Husayn Kassai and Ruhul Amin
Started in: 2012
Based in:  London
Business description: Intelligent background checking platform

Shortlisted categories:

Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Venture Backed Business of the Year, Tech Business of the Year

The Onfido story:

Founded by Young Guns and Oxford University grads Eamon Jubbawy, Husayn Kassai and Ruhul Amin, Onfido is the fast and simple way for businesses to verify identities and run adverse history search checks such as criminal or driving checks.

Created using machine learning and artificial intelligence, Onfido’s platform seeks to bring identity verification “out of the dark ages” by moving away from manual processes “which are slow, expensive and largely inaccurate”, to ultimately help onboard more users, while reducing fraud and drop-out.

The success of this approach has seen the company work with over 1,000 businesses globally – including Deliveroo and Handy – to help verify that a person is who they say they are.

In the space of three years, Onfido has rapidly scaled business operations with offices in London and San Francisco and team numbers swelling to in excess of 145.

Growth is also on the ascent thanks to a $25m Series B funding round in April this year – taking total investment to over $30m – which involved ex-Google UK MD Dan Cobley, and Lastminute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman, alongside well-respected venture capital firms.

Named a start-up to watch by The Financial Times, Onfido is set on building “a trust engine to power human interactions worldwide” and is putting its latest funding towards continuing this “strong upward trajectory”.

Why Onfido made our shortlist:

Onfido is a great example of what can happen when a group of young entrepreneurs come together to create an innovative solution to a real-word problem. Equally as impressive, is the fact that at just 24 years-old co-founder Jubbawy is single-handedly running global operations of the business and heading up the UK headquarters – evidence that age really is just a number!

Where to find out more about Onfido:

Website:  https://onfido.com/
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/Onfido