It’s been a busy start to the year for us with new investments in companies using technology to solve problems across everything from the global plastics epidemic to support for mental health in the workplace, tax and gaming.

One of the biggest issues facing us right now is around our security and ownership of our online footprint. We’re excited to lead a $600k pre-seed round in Silicon Valley founded Passbase, reimagining identity verification by giving individuals ownership of their most sensitive identity data and the tools they need to control who can access it, alongside Alphabet, Stanford, Kleiner Perkins, EY and Upheaval.

With their first enterprise product, Passbase aims to revolutionize the $10B+ identity verification market by offering developers a simple tool to securely identify their users by combining biometric signatures and verified government IDs. These tools help businesses requiring identity verification to reduce fraud, combat fake accounts, reduce the risk of data breaches, and effortlessly comply with privacy regulations.

With simplicity and ease of integration an integral part of the offering, this can be done in under 3 minutes. Companies can now sign-up to try out the product and receive 1000 free verifications as part of the Passbase Beta Program and join the list of 200 companies already signed up.

The Passbase team combines experience from Alphabet’s ambitious R&D division GoogleX, biometric authentication company UnifyID, and German growth machine Rocket Internet. Combining the latest advances in public-key cryptography, biometric authentication, and machine intelligence, Passbase aims to improve the state of privacy and security online by building the world’s first full-stack identity solution and giving the identity outcome back to people.

Co-founder, Dave McGibbon comments, “Identity verification is where online payments were 20 years ago. What we’re doing for identity documents is what PayPal did for credit card numbers.”

On why we decided to invest, our Partner, Sia Houchangnia, adds: “The digital world we live in is crying out for a better identity system. Passbase isn’t the first company to go after this massive opportunity but we believe with all the recent privacy-related scandals, the timing is right for a decentralized approach to the problem which puts people in control of their most sensitive data. To go after such a huge problem, it requires a stellar team that works 10x harder than the rest and we are confident we have found just that with Dave, Mathias, and Felix.”

The team plans to launch their consumer product within the next few weeks which will allow people to track their digital footprint and take back control over the data they have shared with businesses and websites. “We believe this is the first step towards giving people back control over their personal information online. Businesses will always need to identify their users, but with Passbase they can do that in a seamless, privacy-preserving way, ” Mathias Klenk, Co-Founder.