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The path we have traversed

Contrary to our own dislike for start-up stories, we did have an aha moment, way back in 2014. We were not growing, the sales cycles were ridiculously long, and we didn’t find a way to get our clients excited about fraud (entirely our shortcoming). But it did give us a couple of new ideas: instead of fraud detection, we started focussing on fraud prevention. For a while, we didn’t look at the other side of the coin, which was indeed head.

We began working on voice biometrics (think cutting edge, when most others were thinking of copying the next food delivery App in India), as feature phones ruled the roost, as a way to verify a customer’s identity remotely and duly filed a patent (to combine demographics, images and voice profiles at service activation that could be used for preventing future fraud). However, after a lot of hiccups and whatever little money we had fully invested in this, we switched to something that was taking shape at a rapid pace just at our doorstep: Aadhaar eKYC (another aha moment!). We released our multi-factor Aadhaar authentication solution integrating with Aadhaar eKYC, and we were the first to do so in India (and a second patent was filed). In 2016 we began developing Digital KYC solutions with document scanning, face liveness and video verification. And we slowly started expanding the team and, for the first time, crossed 10 staff (a good milestone in six years – we felt pretty good).

At the same time, in 2013, we released our second product Prism (exclusive and first of its kind idea), born in partnership with one of the industry veterans Colin Yates. Prism quickly became the de facto tool to contain IRSF fraud. We know so much about IRSF that we could write a book about its form, shape and prevention. In April 2019, we released Kyzo, a consumer digital document wallet for securely storing and sharing private identity documents with businesses. Once again, we created something unique that didn’t exist before.

So here are the facts: from a single customer in 2011, we added 100+ billable customers in ten years (without a sales team for the first five years and just one now). From a single product, we now have several products. From 2 people, we have grown to 25 people (we are deliberately small). We still remain without any external investments and have no plans to do so in the future. We hope that with the right set of people, products and focus, we should continue to grow for the foreseeable future. As you see, it’s a pretty simple story, with some friendly folks building something valuable every day to help customers succeed.

Next up: Built for businesses, not investors