Payments And Online ID Verification Company Jumio Nabs Strategic Investment From Citi Ventures

Mobile and online payments and ID verification startup Jumio has received an additional Series B investment led by Citi Ventures, a unit of global financial services company Citi. The funding follows Jumio’s $25.5 million Series B from March, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Although Citi’s investment amount is not being disclosed, to date, Jumio has raised $35.4 million in funding.

Other investors in the company include Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Peng T. Ong, partner at GSR Ventures and founder of Match.com, and Vivek Ranadivé, founder of TIBCO.

Alongside Citi’s investment, Jumio also announced that Ramneek Gupta, Managing Director at Citi Ventures, joined Jumio’s board of directors as an observer.

Founded by Daniel Mattes in 2010, Jumio is building a platform which uses computer vision and advanced algorithms to identify credit, debit and ID cards which are held up in front of a computer’s webcam or a mobile phone’s camera. In the case of bank cards, via a product called Netswipe, Jumio is able to “see” the numbers on the card, and then automatically enters them into the form on an e-commerce or m-commerce website or within an application. This is arguably more advantageous on mobile phones, where typing in a long string of numbers on a small keyboard can be cumbersome.

A newer product called NetVerify is taking Jumio’s computer vision techniques and applying them to reading ID cards. Netverify allows merchants to confirm a customer’s identity in real-time, in order to continue an in-process transaction without interruption, eliminating the need for consumers to scan and fax copies of their ID. Instead, they simply hold their ID up to a webcam, Netverify scans it and the merchant gets an instant verification. This will be especially useful for banking and financial institutions – like Citi, of course.

Both products were launched last year, and Jumio recently announced a string of customer deals covering transaction volume of $154 billion.

As for the Citi deal, the company says that Citi saw a lot of potential for Jumio to innovate in the payment space. Citi Ventures’ Ramneek Gupta adds “The Jumio team’s innovative solutions for remote authentication caught our attention as soon as we heard about them. We believe their solutions have the potential to help the online and mobile banking industry overcome key challenges related to fraud and identity theft,” he says.

Jumio says it now has deals in the works with customers in the U.S. and Asia which will be announced later this year.