Ronan and Conor Burke co-founded Inscribe in San Francisco along with Oisin Moran and James Eggers.
Inscribe, an Irish-led business focused on the global $20bn fraud problem, has raised $25m in Series B funding.
The round was led by Threshold Ventures and joined by existing investors Crosslink Capital, Foundry, and Uncork Capital, as well as angel investors including Box co-founder Dylan Smith and Intercom co-founder Des Traynor, bringing the company’s amount of funding raised so far to $38m.
“We’ve started by building best-in-class document fraud detection so companies can uncover the risk intelligence they need to build digital trust with customers. And this is only the beginning”
The funding comes on the heels of the company seeing a 3x year-over-year increase in recurring revenue and a 4x year-over-year increase in monthly usage.
Write their names in code
Ronan and Conor Burke co-founded Inscribe in San Francisco along with Oisin Moran and James Eggers after graduating from university in 2017. Inscribe is an automated document fraud detection system that allows businesses to instantly verify their customers when they request proof of income, proof of address, or proof of expense information.
In 2020 they were listed in Forbes 30 under 30 list and last year revealed plans to create 30 Dublin jobs after raising $10.5m.
Many organizations have responded to this uncertainty by introducing additional steps or requirements in their KYC/KYB and underwriting processes — in which hundreds of hours each week are spent manually reviewing documents determine whether a potential customer can be trusted.
This creates delays for consumers, who can easily leave for a competitive offering. And the stakes are very high: Without a clear understanding of how to identify trustworthy and creditworthy customers, financial institutions are at risk of being defrauded by cybercriminals or rejecting worthy applicants (resulting in millions of unbanked, ‘thin file’, and credit invisible consumers).
“We set out to help solve the uncertainty faced by risk teams everywhere by building artificial intelligence based on the heuristics used by manual review teams,” said CEO Ronan Burke. “So for the first time ever, they can build digital trust by quickly analysing billions of data points with a high degree of accuracy and uncovering insights that were previously invisible to the human eye.
“Technologies that make what’s invisible, visible (like the telescope, the microscope, the x-ray) have always moved society forward in very powerful and important ways. Our mission at Inscribe is to create a fair and efficient financial services ecosystem. We’ve started by building best-in-class document fraud detection so companies can uncover the risk intelligence they need to build digital trust with customers. And this is only the beginning.”
According to Deloitte, 79% of financial institutions said that enhancing the quality, availability, and timeliness of risk data was a top priority even prior to the pandemic. Risk Intelligence is a powerful new way for risk teams to identify fraudulent/legitimate and risky/creditworthy customers. Instead of relying on tedious, subjective, and error-prone manual reviews, companies that use Risk Intelligence software are equipped with AI-powered fraud and credit insights that eliminate uncertainty and make risk decisions easier.
“We believe that Inscribe’s Risk Intelligence will be one of the most significant innovations for the financial services industry since the shift to online banking,” said Josh Stein, co-founder and Managing Partner at Threshold Ventures. “We’re impressed by Inscribe’s growth and vision for the category. They have a team of experienced executives, engineers, and data scientists who are building industry-changing solutions to help businesses grow responsibly.”
The new funding will support Inscribe’s impressive growth, hiring goals, and state-of-the-art innovations in fraud detection. In addition to seeing a 3x increase in ARR and a 4x increase in monthly usage during 2022, Inscribe saw its customer base expand into new areas of financial services. Companies like TripActions, Ramp and General Services Corporation (GSC) are now using the company’s software to uncover Risk Intelligence that saves them hundreds of hours each week and millions of dollars in fraud losses each year.
GSC, a leading provider of apartment homes and apartment management services, became an Inscribe customer after seeing 161% ROI and 12-second document verification times during a trial period.
“Our most seasoned leasing consultants were saying something just doesn’t feel right with some bank statements and pay stubs, but they had no way to verify it,” said Katisha Kersey, Director of Administration at GSC. “With Inscribe, we can catch fraudulent applications, save our team a lot of work, and reduce evictions by ensuring that people meet the criteria at the time of application.”
In 2022, Inscribe was listed on the 2022 AIFintech100 and SaaS award lists.
