Software Search: Persona
Company Snapshot
Founded: 2018
Employees: 180
Funding: $220M
Valuation: $1.5B
Stage: Series C
Locations: San Francisco
Company Overview
Persona is the identity layer of the internet.
Tell Me More
We live in a digitized world where the consumerization of everything has changed even our most basic habits. Need groceries? Instacart it! Buying a house? Go online and get a mortgage at Better! Going to the airport? Don’t make your friend drive you, call an Uber!
The instant gratification and sprawling digital networks we’ve become accustomed to rely on trust enabled networks. For consumers to transact with each of these businesses, the business needs to ensure that the consumer is in fact who they say they are. That could equate to ensuring that no one under 21 successfully purchases alcohol through Instacart, that some random person isn’t applying for a mortgage in someone else’s name, or that the Uber driver you called isn’t a registered sex-offender.
In today’s digital world, identity is not so black and white, especially when it spans to all corners of the internet. That’s where Persona comes in.
Persona is building identity infrastructure for the digital economy. The company’s horizontal identity verification tool services any and all use cases in various industries. The company was founded in 2018 and has quickly scaled to help companies like Square, Brex, BlockFi, Gusto, and Toast help verify and secure their user’s digital identities.
Given that Persona is a horizontal tool, the product’s no-code drag and drop user interface helps companies verify that the people using their product are in fact who they say they are. Identify verification is core to the user onboarding flow of almost all companies in both consumer and enterprise applications. Depending on the underlying use case, a company might require a password, government ID, biometric facial scan, two factor authentication, or an address lookup. Regardless of industry or sub-vertical, every company and product is different, requiring unique user verification flows.
Below, are examples of how Persona’s current customers leverage the product:
Looking to the future, Persona will build beyond identity verification. The company aims to become the best way to manage the full identity lifecycle, including: collection, verification, investigation, and decisioning for companies.
Market Opportunity
Online identity has historically been secured using usernames and passwords to determine whether someone should have access to a particular application or workflow. In today’s highly digitized world, usernames and passwords only go so far. As we bring the offline online, the need for how businesses should think about identity has changed. Additionally, as more industries embrace digital tools, the need for identity verification will expand.
Given how much of our lives have shifted online, the U.S. digital identity market is projected to grow to over $30 billion by 2023 from just under $15 billion in 2019, according to Liminal. Moreover, we can draw a clear line of sight to how industries could leverage identity to keep their businesses running smoothly.
Why I Like the Company
Persona is building the one-stop-shop for identity. Their flexible tool serves as a strong wedge into additional identity infrastructure products and in turn, larger contract values. Persona’s initial product is a strong example of a “picks and shovels” approach to product building. Specifically, the team at Persona recognized that identity is a core part of consumer and business facing products. Now, the team is building a tool that enables other companies to embed the Persona product into their own products. Persona’s approach to product is far from unique, but it’s worked well for other companies like Intercom, Okta, Facebook (login), and Google (maps).
Additionally, the market opportunity grows with every additional digital commerce business that gets built. The company’s horizontal approach to go-to-market works specifically well because the underlying need for identity verification is strong in multiple industries. Similarly, Persona’s flexible product makes it easy to plug-and-play its identity verification capabilities for each customer’s unique needs.Lastly, I subscribe to Index Venture’s idea of a “talent vortex” and would categorize the team that Rick Song and Charles Yeh have built as such. Talent vortexes are the companies that attract the best of the best. They have an enormously high bar for talent. There’s a saying that goes,
“Steve Jobs has a saying that goes, A players hire A players; B players hire C players; and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to Z players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies”
— Guy Kawasaki
Gradually, then suddenly, these talent vortexes companies become the place where top talent goes to build.
Persona’s Hiring Corner
Similar Companies
Reminder
As always, you can find the abbreviated list of companies we’ve already talked about here. Below are links to the previous posts