A biometric onboarding startup focused on the legal services sector has raised £1 million in its latest funding round.
London-based Thirdfort offers a digital app (both on mobile and the web) designed to use facial recognition and document reading to confirm the identities of end users. This approach has proven highly popular in the financial services sector in particular in recent years, but Thirdfort aims its platform at lawyers, pitching it as a means of quickly and remotely onboarding new clients.
Like other selfie-based authentication specialists, Thirdfort has suggested that it is seeing a significant rise in business during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a statement, Thirdfort reported “a five-fold increase in inbound leads during March and April”, and said that since March its team has grown from 15 to 25 employees.
These trends may have helped to drum up excitement among investors. The resent “seed-plus” investment round saw contributions from Funding Circle cofounders James Meekings and Andy Mullinger, R3 founder David Rutter, and the law firm Mishcon de Roya, among others. Thirdfort says it has now raised a total of £2.7 million, and says that it will used the capital to “support investment across all aspects of the business”.
“The need for the legal market to rapidly adapt in light of the Covid-19 pandemic has been a major catalyst for change, and we believe there is an enormous opportunity to help lawyers cut out fraud risk while improving the client experience during life’s big moments, through a slick and simple mobile app,” said Thirdfort cofounder and Managing Director Olly Thornton-Berry. “We’ve seen a huge increase in demand from our law firm clients and, despite a challenging market backdrop, we’ve secured a further £1m investment which will allow us to press the pedal harder on our growth plans.”
Thirdfort first emerged through an accelerator program run by Mishcon de Reya in 2018, and has previously raised funding from Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman and Chris Marks, the former CEO of Natwest Markets.
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