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The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital adoption in a way that no one could have ever anticipated, and as more people conduct more services online and via mobile devices, businesses have had to work even harder to validate users and security. One company working to serve that need, Socure – which uses AI and machine learning to verify identities – announced Tuesday that it has raised $100 million in a Series D funding round at a $1.3 billion valuation.

Given how much of our lives have shifted online, it’s no surprise that the U.S. digital identity market is projected to increase to over $30 billion by 2023 from just under $15 billion in 2019, according to One World Identity. This has led to skyrocketing demand for the services provided by identity verification companies. 

Historically, Socure has been focused on the financial services industry, but it plans to use its new capital to further expand into “every consumer-facing vertical” including online gaming, healthcare, telco, e-commerce, and on-demand services.

The startup’s predictive analytics platform applies artificial intelligence and machine-learning techniques with online/offline data intelligence (from email, phone, address, IP, device, velocity, and the broader internet) to verify that people are, in fact, who they say they are when applying for various accounts.

Today, Socure has more than 350 customers including three top five banks, six top 10 card issuers, a “top” credit bureau and over 75 fintechs such as Varo Money, Public, Chime, and Stash.

Accel led Socure’s latest financing, which included participation from existing backers Commerce Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Flint Capital, Citi Ventures, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, Synchrony, Sorenson, Two Sigma Ventures, and others. 

The round comes less than six months after the company raised $35 million in a round led by Sorenson Ventures, and brings the New York-based company’s total raised to $196 million since its 2012 inception.

Socure founder and CEO Johnny Ayers says his company’s identity management products can help B2C enterprises achieve know-your-customer (KYC) auto-approval rates of up to 97%. This means that financial institutions can more easily capture fraud, for example, via Socure’s single API. The company also claims that by more easily verifying thin-file (those without much credit history) and young consumers, it can help reduce the underbanked population.     

The company plans to use its new capital to also enhance its product offering as it continues to develop patents. 

Accel partner Amit Jhawar will join Socure’s board as part of the funding round.

In a blog post, Jhawar described Socure as “a purpose-built solution designed to handle the wave of new online users because its machine learning models have learned from every identity it has already seen.”

As former COO at Braintree and general  manager at Venmo, Jhawar knows a thing or two about the importance of identity verification, especially in the financial services space.

He wrote: “I knew immediately that the Socure solution would be a game-changer because the solution can be used in every step of the customer lifecycle, from account creation to login to transaction.”

Socure also has hinted that it has an IPO in its future.

In a written statement, Ayers said: “We are incredibly grateful for the chance to innovate and partner to solve this problem with some of the greatest companies in the world and are energized for the opportunities that lay ahead for Socure, especially as we make our march to a potential IPO.”

TechCrunch has reached out to Socure and will update this story with more details.

Occasionally, it’s easy for startups to achieve so-called product-market fit, but more often, it’s a struggle. Perhaps no one knows this as well as Sean Lane, co-founder and CEO of Olive, a company whose software completes so many tedious administrative healthcare tasks for hospitals that it is currently valued by investors at $1.5 billion.

Somewhat amazingly, the nearly nine-year-old company raised $380 million of the $445 million it has raised altogether just last year. In fact, Olive is now growing so fast, and clicking along so well, that Lane just raised $50 million in funding last month for a second startup that uses Olive’s same tech platform. He’s CEO of that startup, called Circulo, too.

It’s impressive. It also took Lane around 28 big and small pivots to build the kind of high-growth, fast-scaling businesses that he always wanted to create — moves he’s going to discuss with us at TechCrunch’s upcoming two-day, all-virtual TC Early Stage event coming up April 1 and 2.

The idea: to save other founders from having to undergo the same anguishing twists and turns by sharing what he learned along his own path.

Lane had some help. Specifically, he has long credited one of his early investors, Mark Kvamme of Drive Capital, for helping identify a big opportunity amid of sea of smaller opportunities. As Lane told the outlet Columbus CEO a few year ago, before meeting Kvamme, he had a nice life in Baltimore, with a house on the water with his wife. Lane, who was once a U.S. Air Force and National Security Administration intelligence officer, was angel investing, co-running a tech incubator and had co-founded a company called CrossChx to link fingerprints to electronic medical records.

A chance encounter with Kvamme, a Silicon Valley VC who had moved to Columbus, would change everything. To wit, after Lane talked with him about his endeavors in Baltimore, as well as having bigger ambitions to create an “internet of healthcare,” Kvamme persuaded Lane to abandon his various projects, relocate to Columbus, and focus entirely on a newer, better CrossChx.

That’s now looking like a smart bet by Kvamme, who wrote CrossChx — later renamed Olive — its first check. But even with Kvamme’s support, Olive’s success hardly happened overnight. Lane has said he met with plenty of resistance as he tried and scrapped numerous products. As with many growing startups that veer in a new direction, there were painful layoffs. He also eventually parted ways with his co-founder, Brad Mascho, who left the company in late 2017 in an apparent cloud of exhaustion. He’d “worked his butt off for a good four years,” as Lane told Columbus CEO.

It’s many of these tough points in Olive’s trajectory — and particularly those product pivots — that we’ll be talking about in a few short weeks at our upcoming event. Indeed, for those who’ve struggled with their own ambitions, or their own product roadmaps, or who’ve wondered what they could be doing better or smarter or faster to grow their own companies, this is one conversation that should not be missed.

Even better, our talk with Lane is just one part of a two-day event exploring the many aspects of early-stage startups — check out the entire agenda line up here.

It’s coming up fast, so be sure to grab your ticket to TC Early Stage on April 1-2 — and, by the way, you can save $100 or more when you get the dual-event ticket for both our April and July events. The latter is coming up July 8 and 9. You can learn more here.

Google will lower its Play commissions globally for developers that sell in-app digital goods and services on its marquee store, the company said, following a similar move by rival Apple late last year.

The Android-maker said on Tuesday that starting July 1, it is reducing the service fee for Google Play to 15% — down from 30% — for the first $1 million of revenue developers earn using Play billing system each year. The company will levy a 30% cut on every dollar developers generate through Google Play beyond the first $1 million in a year, it said.

Citing its own estimates, Google said 99% of developers that sell goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees, and that 97% of apps globally do not sell digital goods or pay any service fee.

Google’s new approach is slightly different from Apple, which last year said it would collect 15% rather than 30% of App Store sales from companies that generate no more than $1 million in revenue through the company’s platform. That drop doesn’t apply to iOS apps if a developer’s revenue on Apple platform exceeds $1 million.

“We’ve heard from our partners making $2 million, $5 million and even $10 million a year that their services are still on a path to self-sustaining orbit,” wrote Sameer Samat, VP of Android and Google Play, in a blog post.

“This is why we are making this reduced fee on the first $1 million of total revenue earned each year available to every Play developer that uses the Play billing system, regardless of size. We believe this is a fair approach that aligns with Google’s broader mission to help all developers succeed.”

The move comes months after changes in Google billing system charges rattled many startups in India. More than 150 startups banded together last year after Google said it will collect as high as 30% cut on in-app purchases in a range of categories made by Android apps.

Following the backlash, Google delayed mandating the planned Play Store payments rule in India to April 2022 and had reached out to several firms in recent months in the country to better understand their concerns, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and chief executive of mobile payments provider Paytm, India’s most valuable startup, dismissed Google’s move today as a “PR stunt.”

In an interview with TechCrunch, Sharma said established firms like his will still have to pay an exorbitant amount of fee to Google. Today’s announcement by Google, he said, further raises the question whether Google plans to address concerns raised by serious internet firms at all.

The biggest concern firms face today is the inability to use a third-party payments service for billing, he said. “They are basically saying that as soon as you build a business larger than $1 million — which is a very low bar — you are going to pay a 30% fee, which after taxes, becomes 44%,” he said.

A 30% sales cut and the inability to use third-party billing system have been points of contention between many developers and app store operators — Apple and Google — and led to a lawsuit by Fortnite-maker Epic Games against the iPhone-maker last year. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney had alleged that Apple’s move to lower the App Store fee for smaller developers was orchestrated to sow division among app creators.

Sharma said he was hopeful that Google will address other concerns, especially because in a country like India “we don’t have any other operating system, or distribution platform. They effectively control the destiny of every app developer in the country.”

Android commands 99% of the smartphone market in India, according to research firm Counterpoint. “Earlier India was powered by Android, then we became dependent on Android, and now it is controlled by Android,” said Sharma, whose payments app competes with Google Pay in the world’s second largest internet market.

Google’s Samat said,”We look forward to seeing more businesses scale to new heights on Android, and to further discussions with the Indian developer community to find new ways to support them technically and economically as they build their businesses.”

“Once developers confirm some basic information to help us understand any associated accounts they have and ensure we apply the 15% properly, this discount will automatically renew each year,” he wrote.

A security breach at cryptocurrency platform Roll allowed a hacker to obtain the private key to its hot wallet and steal its contents — worth about $5.7 million.

In a statement, the company said it was investigating the breach, which happened early Sunday.

“As of this writing, it seems like a compromise of the private keys [sic] of our hot wallet and not a bug in the Roll smart contracts or any token contracts,” the statement said. Roll said the attacker had already sold the tokens for Ethereum.

“There is no further user action suggested at this stage. We are temporarily disabling withdraw from the Roll wallet of all social money until we have migrated our hot wallet,” the statement added.

It’s not clear how the attacker broke in and obtained the private key — akin to the password for Roll’s hot wallet. Hot wallets are designed to be connected to the internet to send and receive cryptocurrency, but typically only store a fraction of a cryptocurrency owner’s total reserves, given the inherent security risk of an internet-connected wallet. A cold wallet, or storage device that isn’t connected to the internet, is typically used for holding the bulk of an owner’s cryptocurrency for longer-term periods.

Roll allows creators to mint and distribute their own Ethereum-based cryptocurrency, known as social tokens, under which the creators can decide how the currency is spent. There are hundreds of different kinds of social currency on the platform, including $WHALE, $RARE, and $PICA tokens — which plummeted in value in the aftermath of the breach.

The creator of the $WHALE token said in a tweet more than 2% of its tokens were stolen in the Roll breach, but that the hack was “minimally detrimental” to the project.

Others weren’t so lucky. One person said they had “lost everything,” while others criticized Roll’s new $500,000 fund to help affected creators for not going far enough.

Roll said it will hire a third-party to audit its security infrastructure to prevent another breach. “We will also run a forensic analysis to figure out how the key was compromised,” the statement said.

Talk about surprise comebacks. This morning Google announced the arrival of the next-gen Nest Hub. In spite of rebranding from Google Home Hub back in 2019, the smart screen hasn’t seen many changes since its 2018 introduction. Today’s arrival doesn’t represent a huge upgrade from its predecessor, but it does support a familiar — and largely forgotten — face.

We haven’t heard a peep from Project Soli since the technology was introduced with the Pixel in late-2019. The miniature, motion-sensing radar tech was positioned to be a major selling point, finally arriving on a device some four years after being announced. Applications were relatively few and far between — including gesture detection and a weird, one-off Pokémon app.

And then it just sort of went away. The Pixel 5 arrived the following year, without a trace of Motion Sense. Abandoning features certainly isn’t unheard of in consumer electronics, but it seemed odd for something in which Google had clearly invested time and resources.

Image Credits: Google

Soli’s reemergence in the new Nest Hub is certainly unexpected, but may ultimately make more sense than any of its attempted mobile applications. The primary use here is sleep tracking, the biggest update between the new Nest Hub and the original. As for why Soli, the answer goes deeper than the fact that Google was looking for a new home for its existing tech (though that no doubt also played a role).

Like the first-gen product, there’s no camera on the new Nest Hub. Google’s decision to keep the tech off the device is a breath of fresh air in a world where the new Amazon Echo uses figure tracking to actually follow you around the room. As before, you can always opt for the Nest Hub Max if that feature’s important to you. But the company rightfully noted that the first-gen model was often deployed at bedsides.

That means:

1. Sticking a camera on the connected device raises some major privacy concerns.

2. It’s an ideal spot for doing some sleep tracking.

Which leads us to:

1. How do you do sleep tracking without a camera?

The easy answer is a wearable device. Google now has a much stronger foothold in that world now that its Fitbit acquisition has cleared. But that deal is going to take some time to fully take root. And besides, as someone who has tested a lot of wearables in my day, I can definitely say that, no matter how comfortable, I sleep better without one on my wrist. Certainly the irony of being kept awake by a sleep tracker has not escaped me.

Quick refresher on Soli tech, per Google:

Soli consists of a millimeter-wave frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar transceiver that emits an ultra-low power radio wave and measures the reflected signal from the scene of interest. The frequency spectrum of the reflected signal contains an aggregate representation of the distance and velocity of objects within the scene. This signal can be processed to isolate a specified range of interest, such as a user’s sleeping area, and to detect and characterize a wide range of motions within this region, ranging from large body movements to sub-centimeter respiration.

Image Credits: Google

So, basically, you’re trading camera-based sensing for mini-bedside radar. It’s a weird thing to wrap your brain around, certainly. The biggest thing here is that the motion-tracking data is not collecting any images, just data based on movement.

The Sleep Sensing system was trained on more than 100,000 hours of sleep data, according to the company, with TensorFlow being used to analyze data. Among other things. It’s able to eliminate external movement like ceiling fans, after the initial calibration process is completed. In addition to tracking, the system leverages other sleep-centric features that were rolled out to the last Nest Hub via software update, including Sunrise Alarm and the ability to snooze your wake-up call with a gesture.

There are other software updates on-board as well, including a new smart home interface. On the whole, however, there really aren’t too many improvements beyond sleep tracking — which is actually okay, since the original remains one of the better smart screens on the market. The speaker got a little bit of love, with added bass, but even that is largely the same. The screen size remains the same at 7-inches, while the overall device footprint is a bit larger to accommodate the slight speaker improvement. The body is made from 54% post-consumer plastic.

At $99, the price is certainly right. Google shaved off $49 from the original Hub. It’s up for pre-order starting today and will be available for sale on the 30^th.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/09/google-nest-hub-max-review/