A New Era of Document Verification: Socure and Berbix

On June 27, we announced that Berbix, the company I co-founded in 2018 to make online ID checks as simple as an in-person ID check, had been acquired by Socure.

Where We Started

Berbix was founded based on a perspective that identity document verification technology was evolving too slowly to keep up with the advances in technology and market demands. We felt that it was time to redefine the state of the art for document verification, and through that drive the industry forward and create real impact in people’s lives.

Prior to co-founding Berbix, I led the engineering trust and safety team at Airbnb. During my time there, we were tasked with creating trustworthy and safe experiences for all users: an enormous challenge for any online marketplace that facilitates offline interactions. I was fortunate enough to be part of the early stages in developing the Verified ID product, which was a crucial first step in creating a unified identity platform for the Airbnb platform. While we leveraged many of the best identity tools available at the time, we found that even the best left us wanting something with more reliability and better user experience.

From that seed, the idea for Berbix was born. 

We built Berbix from the ground up with a foundation of thoughtful, privacy-first, security-minded technology.We developed a powerful forensics and data extraction engine that is able to extract hyper-accurate data with an emphasis on machine-readable components. We created advanced image processing pipelines and fast response times to maximize our user experience. We filed patents for new ways to catch the most sophisticated fake IDs. We built something we were truly proud of. But despite the strength of our identity document verification solution, it was only one component of a complete identity stack. 

Why Socure?

From the time we first met with Socure, it was clear how much this opportunity would enable us to magnify our impact by expanding the reach of our technology and immediately improve the capabilities of the system for both Berbix and Socure customers. While we had a great team of engineers and data scientists, we were deeply impressed by what we saw in Socure’s investments. Combining the strengths of our team with the world-class computer vision and image capture teams would allow us to immediately improve the performance of our solution. Being able to leverage the industry-leading  identity graph that Socure has established would allow us to be more confident and accurate in our results, all while meeting more of our customers’ needs.

When we combine the strengths of Berbix and Socure, the resulting DocV 3.0 is a superior predictive document verification solution with the industry’s fastest response time, most true accepts, and best fraud capture on the market. When we combine the lessons learned from our experience at Berbix with the strength of Socure’s SDK teams, the result is market-leading image capture, client-side models, and a truly unique user experience with unmatched accessibility features. And we are only just getting started: the combined strength of these teams is leading to an expedited pace of innovation for the future. This will enable deployment in a range of new use cases that are continually evolving, from driver verification for car rentals and ride-sharing to step-up identity document verification for wiring large sums of money and other high risk transactions.

Myself and the Berbix team are thrilled to join Socure. The market has never seen a product with this level of accuracy and performance and we couldn’t be more excited for what this means for the future of digital identity verification.

If you’d like to learn more about the acquisition and what it means for our customers, visit our resource page here.