Our Investment in Persona
I first connected with Persona cofounder and CEO Rick Song after their Series A in February 2020 before COVID. Our VP of Engineering at Pared had talked to him about verifying identities on our platform. It was something that was challenging but critical to our business and many other businesses. When someone onboarded to Pared, we wanted to know that they were who they said they were. They were still building out their product at the time and we didn’t end up working together then, but it was clear that they were trying to solve a very important problem that many organizations struggled with. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that their business has grown over 10x since then and their customer base has 5x-ed in that same period of time. The customer need spans industries from healthcare to fintech to travel and includes names Square, Udemy, AngelList, Gusto, Robinhood, Sonder, and Brex among others.
Persona offers identity infrastructure that enables businesses to build personalized and automated identity verification solutions. Companies can access a suite of verification options such as government-issued IDs and biometrics, as well as thousands of data sources to get a holistic view of their customers’ identities. Persona plans to implement even more features to help customers verify identities more accurately and streamline the end-to-end identity verification process. This is all accessible via a low code and no code option to make integration simple for the customer. Persona is working hard to make a tailored and customized solution for each customer because their use cases will vary greatly and their identity verification needs will exist long after onboarding. Ultimately the goal is to give their customers peace of mind that they are doing everything they can to deter fraud, stay complaint, and build trust and safety with their users.
Hyphen is proud to be investing alongside Index Ventures and Coatue Management in this $50 million Series B funding round that was just announced. Rick and Charles have been a part of the Asian American Founders Circle for over a year now and we are lucky to have them. They believe in the mission of Hyphen Capital investing in and supporting Asian American founders and want to someday pay it forward by lifting up others. There was obviously a lot of demand from investors for this round and we were one of the only new investors with access because it was important to Rick and Charles to include us on the cap table. We are humbled and grateful that Hyphen Capital will be a part of the Persona journey with them for years to come.
