Inscribe raises $25M in Series B funding

Inscribe, the award-winning fraud detection and document automation platform, has announced that it has raised $25M in Series B funding to help companies build digital trust by pioneering Risk Intelligence. The round was led by Threshold Ventures and joined by existing investors Crosslink Capital, Foundry, and Uncork Capital, as well as angel investors including Box co-founder Dylan Smith and Intercom co-founder Des Traynor, bringing the company’s amount raised to $38M, and comes on the heels of the company seeing a 3x year-over-year increase in ARR and a 4x year-over-year increase in monthly usage.

With B2C and B2B buyers now being accustomed to frictionless interactions that provide instant gratification, fast response times are now the most important attribute of customer experience. But an increasingly digital, geographically dispersed, and faster world makes it more difficult than ever to know who you’re doing business with — leaving companies uncertain about whether a potential customer is trustworthy. And their fears are justified: New research shows that the average U.S. fintech loses $51M to fraud annually, and the impact of fraud has a negative ripple effect across the entire company.

Many organisations have responded to this uncertainty by introducing additional steps or requirements in their KYC/KYB and underwriting processes — in which hundreds of hours each week are spent manually reviewing documents determine whether a potential customer can be trusted. This creates delays for consumers, who can easily leave for a competitive offering. And the stakes are very high: Without a clear understanding of how to identify trustworthy and creditworthy customers, financial institutions are at risk of being defrauded by cybercriminals or rejecting worthy applicants (resulting in millions of unbanked, “thin file,” and credit invisible consumers).

“We set out to help solve the uncertainty faced by risk teams everywhere by building artificial intelligence based on the heuristics used by manual review teams. So for the first time ever, they can build digital trust by quickly analysing billions of data points with a high degree of accuracy and uncovering insights that were previously invisible to the human eye. Technologies that make what’s invisible, visible (like the telescope, the microscope, the x-ray) have always moved society forward in very powerful and important ways,” said Inscribe co-founder and CEO Ronan Burke. “Our mission at Inscribe is to create a fair and efficient financial services ecosystem. We’ve started by building best-in-class document fraud detection so companies can uncover the Risk Intelligence they need to build digital trust with customers. And this is only the beginning.”

According to Deloitte, 79% of financial institutions said that enhancing the quality, availability, and timeliness of risk data was a top priority even prior to the pandemic. Risk Intelligence is a powerful new way for risk teams to identify fraudulent/legitimate and risky/creditworthy customers. Instead of relying on tedious, subjective, and error-prone manual reviews, companies that use Risk Intelligence software are equipped with AI-powered fraud and credit insights that eliminate uncertainty and make risk decisions easier.

“We believe that Inscribe’s Risk Intelligence will be one of the most significant innovations for the financial services industry since the shift to online banking,” said Josh Stein, co-founder and Managing Partner at Threshold Ventures. “We’re impressed by Inscribe’s growth and vision for the category. They have a team of experienced executives, engineers, and data scientists who are building industry-changing solutions to help businesses grow responsibly.”

The new funding will support Inscribe’s impressive growth, hiring goals, and state-of-the-art innovations in fraud detection. In addition to seeing a 3x increase in ARR and a 4x increase in monthly usage during 2022, Inscribe saw its customer base expand into new areas of financial services. Companies like TripActions, Ramp and General Services Corporation (GSC) are now using the company’s software to uncover Risk Intelligence that saves them hundreds of hours each week and millions of dollars in fraud losses each year.

In 2022, Inscribe was listed on the 2022 AIFintech100 and SaaS award lists. To learn more about Inscribe’s award-winning fraud detection and document automation solutions, visit www.inscribe.ai.

A podcast interview with Conor Burke, CTO and Co-founder can be heard here.