Wall Street Journal: Trooly, Backed by $10M, Evaluates Trustworthiness

Published June 20, 2016 via Wall Street Journal

By YULIYA CHERNOVA

How agreeable, conscientious or neurotic are you? Sarabjit Baveja says he can tell just by looking at your LinkedIn profile, even though such questions are usually answered via standardized psychological surveys.

“I do that as a party trick,” said Mr. Baveja, chief executive and co-founder of Trooly Inc., which has developed an approach to measuring the trustworthiness of a person or business.

The Los Altos, Calif.-based startup raised more than $8 million in Series A financing last year, led by Bain Capital Ventures, with backing from Milliways Ventures, which also led a seed round of $1.5 million. The company hasn’t previously disclosed its funding.

Mr. Baveja co-founded Trooly after a long career at Bain & Co. His partners are two former research scientists: Anish Das Samas, formerly of Google, and Nilesh Dalvi, a Facebook and Yahoo alumnus.

Sarabjit Baveja, chief executive of Trooly Inc.PHOTO: TROOLY INC.

With the rise of the sharing economy, trust is increasingly important as more strangers interact with businesses or households. Many businesses use background checks, as well as identity verification. Complementing those conventional tools, Trooly offers additional ways to measure risk that it says are often more accurate and less expensive.

For less than a dollar per screening or verification query, Trooly returns an answer in less than a minute. Its revenue is in the single-digit millions of dollars annually now, Mr. Baveja said.

Trooly, with a staff of 21 people, scours publicly available online records, search engines, and webpages that it has indexed exclusively. That includes every page of websites of known hate groups and comments posted in community forums, for example. It then spits out a rating on its own “trust index: that it says is predictive. The information can figure into hiring and other decisions, Mr. Baveja said.

This type of work raises privacy and discrimination questions. The company, based on what it considers nonintrusive searches, says it uses an algorithm to draw conclusions or make observations about individuals that can impact their lives in a significant way.

Whether businesses will need or want to employ novel data assessments remains to be seen. Some lending startups have moved away from using the FICO score as the gold standard to gauge creditworthiness. But the majority of financial services providers have stayed with FICO.

Trooly is working with businesses in the sharing economy, Mr. Baveja said, and has pilot programs in financial-service firms. UrbanSitter Inc., the online baby sitter startup, also is a client.

Trooly says it complies with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It also plans to allow individuals to check their rating on Trooly, correct profile data, or opt out of its ratings.

Write to Yuliya Chernova at yuliya.chernova@wsj.com