Verihubs Develops API-Based Verification Solution for Digital Enterprises

The verification process is an important component in every digital activation or transaction. The implementation itself is very necessary to measure the correctness and compatibility with each other in various enterprise ecosystems, including in E-commerce, financial institutions, games online, and even social media.

One of the players trying to target this segment is verihubs, an API-based service that helps digital companies in the verification process using local data sources and accessing financial information and user identity. This platform just graduated and achieved seed funding from the Y Combinator accelerator program.

Starting from the issue of illegal loans that hit one of his family members, Verihubs CEO & Co-founder, Rick Firnando, who at that time worked at a SaaS company, began to see this as an opportunity. Then, while working he also received several requests from companies for verification solutions. His meeting with Williem, who was studying AI at that time face recognition at one of the universities in Korea, has strengthened Rick's intention to build this API-based verification solution.

In launching products, Rick also revealed, "Our mission is to help new and existing digital-based service companies (including fintech) to start their business and transition from manual verification to fully automated processes, each by providing a single platform for all KYC solutions, enabling customers to get authentication, verification and authorization to our client services in seconds."

Business model and future targets

Verihubs started offering its solutions in 2019 covering customer onboarding processes, from phone number verification, end-to-end KYC processes, fraud detection, to linking bank accounts. In addition, this platform also provides interconnection between financial platforms that allows end users to immediately withdraw funds directly from the bank account of their choice through instant verification.

Technology deep learning implemented is claimed to reduce the risk of errors and ensure a smooth process to improve the user experience. The company uses five AI-based authentication technologies, namely Face Recognition, Liveness Detection, Face Search, Text Recognitionand Telco Credit Score.

In the course of developing this solution, Rick acknowledged the challenges they faced when they were still starting a business. At that time the new company got pre seed with relatively few teams, while technical talent is needed to develop a SaaS platform. But over time, the company is growing and until now the team has 25 members with 75% being the product team and engineers.

The company applies a business model based on transaction fees, the client will pay according to the number of successful verifications. To date, Verihubs has processed more than 6 million verifications and is trusted by around 45 leading companies, half of which are in the financial sector; such as Payfazz, Bank Central Asia, and Commonwealth Bank.

For the target in the next year, his team admits that they are exploring a solution open banking for financial access. In addition, the one that is also in pipeline is expansion to Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Market competition

In Indonesia itself, there are already several services that target similar segments such as ASLI RI. In collaboration with LoginID, a company from Silicon Valley, ASLI RI launches a product OriginalLoginID, a Biometric-Authentication as a Service (BaaS) platform that has FIDO2 certification. The certification is one of the most stringent security standards today, is internationally recognized and compatible with various types of computing device operating systems.

In addition, one of the artificial intelligence-based service development startups nodeflux also has a business line that focuses on developing solutions to simplify the eKYC process, namely Identification. Nodeflux itself is one of the partners of the Directorate General of Civil Registration as a joint platform provider to provide the best performance in data utilization without security risks.

Regarding the SaaS industry landscape that specifically develops API-based verification solutions, Rick also said that in terms of education, the target market for this service already has a good understanding of the importance of verification solutions. "As the fintech industry and other digital-based companies grow, this solution will be increasingly needed and developed," he said.

According to a report from ReportLinker, the global software as a service (SaaS) market is expected to grow from $225,6 billion in 2020 to $272,49 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20,8%. The market is expected to reach $436,9 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 12,5%.

Accelerator program

Founded in 2019, Verihubs was involved in several accelerator programs. At the end of 2020, his team became one of the participants in batch The first is from Startup Studio Indonesia, a program organized by the Ministry of Communication and Information of the Republic of Indonesia to facilitate digital startups that are in the process of reaching the product-market fit.

After that, Verihubs also participated in the Indigo Demo Day 1-2021 held by Indigo Creative Nation on June 15, 2021 ago, the team had the opportunity to pitching directly and witnessed by leading Venture Capital from within and outside the country. From here, they managed to gain attention and funding seed from the US-based accelerator program Y Combinator.

As one of those who had the opportunity to undergo the YC accelerator program, Verihubs admitted that it received many benefits apart from funding. "Not only funding, but we are also really taught from the product side and the community is very strong. We have broad connections to be able to going global," said Rick, who when interviewed was preparing for a Demo Day session and was scheduled to graduate from the Y Combinator program this week.

Reporting from Crunchbase, apart from Indigo Creative Nation, this Indonesia-based company is also supported by several companies angel investors for pre seed including the Co-Founder of Payfazz, Hendra Kwik and the Co-Founder & CEO of Xfers, Tianwei Liu.