May 27, 2020
Investing in tools for the Trust Economy: Mati joins Spero portfolio
Our latest investment, Mati, aims to help Trust Economy companies scale faster through a frictionless, global identity verification solution.
“As a college freshman I realized I did not have sufficient identity to open a bank account. It’s like I didn’t exist. I was new to the US, having lived in Poland and the UK. I knew my experience was not unique and it became a point of obsession for me to standardize legally verified identity for everyone.”
— Filip Victor, Co-Founder and CEO of Mati
By Shripriya Mahesh and Sara Eshelman
Verified Identity — proof that I am who I say I am — forms a critical foundation for safe and trusted interactions throughout our global economy and society. Unsurprisingly, it’s even more important in digital settings. The Trust Economy (e.g., fintech companies, rental platforms, delivery businesses, even dating apps, and many more) is and will continue to be based on some form of verified identity. While trust comes in many forms — between companies and their users; between borrowers and lenders; between users exchanging with one another; between buyers and sellers — one thing is always true: both parties have to be verified in order for a transaction to begin.
Since the earliest days of online commerce and banking, identity verification has been a key capability advanced by companies and regulators as a way to foster trust and limit fraud. As more of our daily interactions rely on trust brokered by digital platforms and services, it’s critical that identity verification becomes easy to implement, at a significantly lower cost, with a better UX ready for consumer-wide use, and be available globally to unlock borderless growth for those Trust Economy companies.
And so it gives us great pleasure to announce our investment in Mati.
Mati, led by co-founders Filip Victor and Amaury Soviche, is developing a user identity verification one-stop-shop that enables anyone, without any technical skills, to add an identity verification step to their onboarding or account creation processes. Depending on their countries of operation or industry, companies can decide what aspects of identity to verify (biometric liveness, key ID documents, government database presence, watchlists, email address, IP, etc.) and even set their own confidence thresholds or UX based on their needs.
Mati’s solution is automated, making it fast and affordable even at a very large scale. Mati’s ambition is to make starting or scaling a lending company in Africa, a car sharing startup in Poland, or a safer dating app in Brazil as easy selling socks on Amazon by providing those Trust Economy companies the tools they need. Mati aims to serve companies and users around the world. It is currently helping companies from the United States, Latin America and Europe to scale to other parts of the world.
At Spero Ventures, we believe identity is foundational to scaling the vast array of gig economy, fintech, social, and commerce platforms that represent our collective future of work.
We are excited to partner with Mati in its mission to be the one-stop shop for user identity verification, enabling any platform that facilitates interaction or transaction among unknown parties to ensure trust and safety among users, and ultimately, accelerating the development of the Trust Economy everywhere in the world.
