Identity verification startup Persona raises $200M at $2B valuation – News

Persona Identities Inc., a startup that helps companies such as online retailers verify the identity of users, has closed a $200 million late-stage funding round.

The Series D investment was announced today. Founders Fund and Ribbit Capital led the deal with participation from returning backers BOND, Coatue, First Round Capital and Index Ventures. Persona is now valued at $2 billion.

Services such as banking apps verify new users by asking them to submit identity documents during the sign-up process. In many cases, the verification workflow also draws on other data points. A company might, for example, compare a new user’s IP address against a database of IP addresses associated with hacker activity. Building software workflows that can perform those tasks is a complicated, time-consuming endeavor.

Persona promises to ease the process. The San Francisco startup’s namesake cloud platform provides prepackaged features for implementing identity verification features. Persona says that its software is used by more than 3,000 customers including OpenAI, Instacart Inc. and other major tech firms.

The company provides a library of interface elements that can be used to quickly build an application’s sign-up form. According to Persona, developers may adjust the number of verification steps that users must complete based on the risk associated with a sign-up attempt. The higher the risk level, the more verification steps are required. 

The platform uses artificial intelligence to scan uploaded documents for signs of tempering. It can also spot other issues such as expired IDs. After filtering invalid uploads, the AI automatically organizes user documents by type to make them easier to process.

Persona also takes other types of data into account when reviewing sign-up attempts. The company’s platform can analyze technical information about the device from which an account registration request is submitted. It also considers behavioral signals such as distraction events, or interruptions in the sign-up workflow, and whether or not a customer uses an autofill tool.

Companies can optionally configure Persona to repeat the verification process in response to certain events. An e-commerce marketplace operator, for example, could require verification every time a user places a large purchase.

Fraudsters often carry out illicit activity using not one but multiple malicious accounts that work in tandem. Persona provides an analytics tool that can identify such malicious account clusters, as well retrieve historical data that shows how they were created. Companies can optionally enrich the information that the tool uses to spot fraudulent activity with internal data and signals from third-party providers.

“As we move into an era of agentic AI, identity challenges won’t just grow — they’ll multiply,” Persona co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Rick Song wrote in a blog post today. “The real hurdle is no longer spotting bots; it’s verifying who’s behind every action and whether they can be trusted.” 

Persona’s latest funding round follows a year in which both its customer count and revenue doubled. The company says that it completed more than 300 million verifications in 2024. 

Image: Persona