Passbase provides developer-friendly, privacy-oriented identity verification infrastructure that helps companies meet KYC, AML, and age-verification requirements. Its product features an intuitive verification flow and back-office compliance tooling that can be integrated in as little as 30 minutes and supports over 6,000 IDs across 190 countries and 15 languages. In the last year the company grew revenue 8x by helping crypto, fintech, and other firms solve digital identity verification challenges amid rapidly changing global compliance requirements. Passbase plans to scale its team and operations and build a policy and workflow manager that sits on top of its verification service, plus industry-specific policy templates to help customers enter new markets faster. The company emphasizes a privacy-centric infrastructure and a developer-first approach to enable automated and branded verification flows worldwide. Passbase originated as a 2018 pivot from the cryptocurrency wallet Coinance and is pursuing a vision of becoming a digital identity infrastructure for web3 companies. Passbase, founded in 2018 and based in Berlin, builds a full-stack, privacy-preserving digital identity verification solution that uses video selfies and identity-document scans. Its self-service developer platform claims integrations within minutes, positioning it against legacy providers with long sales cycles and complex integrations. Security features include NIST-certified facial recognition, forensic ID authenticity analysis, and a patent-pending zero-knowledge sharing architecture to limit data exposure. The company says the product helps businesses detect stolen identity information and retain audit histories without sharing extraneous personal details. Financially, Passbase raised €3.3 million in its most recent round, six months after a €530k pre-seed. With the new funding it plans to bolster its identity verification product, launch a biometric reauthentication tool, and expand teams in New York and Berlin while targeting the $24.12 billion identity access management market. Passbase offers a full-stack identity engine and SDKs that let developers integrate facial recognition, liveness detection, ID authenticity checks and ID information extraction while embedding user privacy controls. The product claims deployment to web or mobile in under three minutes with seven lines of code and demonstrates a FaceID-style 3D selfie plus ID document scanning. Its architecture leverages public-private key encryption, blockchain ideas and biometric authentication to enable zero-knowledge authentications so users can prove identity or age without sharing full documents. The company is in closed beta with more than 200 companies signed up and five handpicked firms running closed pilots ahead of an open beta planned for mid-year. Planned features include PEP and OFAC screening to serve mobility, age-restricted products and eventually online banking/fintech KYC needs; the team is filing patents and pursuing certifications such as ISO and FIDO. Passbase partners with external security providers while maintaining in-house computer vision expertise for anti-spoofing and liveness detection, and the founders emphasize building an inclusive company culture alongside product development.

Total raised

$18M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Dec 2021