Our Investment In Sperta

As the saying goes, “Where there’s money, there’s fraud.” And as I have come to realize,

Solving financial fraud across all enterprise software is, clearly, a big hairy deal. It’s tricky, though. KYC (know-your-customer), an identity verification mechanism, is required by law for every financial institution. Application fraud protection, though similar, is actually different. After all, KYC will tell you if you have a real identity, but not that you have a stolen identity. Yikes!

Modern businesses that make financial decisions about users need to combine multiple data sources, run analysis in real-time, and do it with a sufficiently flexible and secure infrastructure that it can map to underwriting criteria. This requires real engineering, and a surprising number of companies still do this poorly, do it themselves, or don’t do it at all. Enter Sperta.

Yifu and Ming, the founders of Sperta, are friends and old coworkers. They worked together at Mastermind, a project birthed at Uber focused on fraud. While there, they built a system to track the hundreds of millions of records in real-time. They were able to reduce fraud loss by 80% in two months while at Uber, and went on to built highly robust systems at Cardless and Google Cloud before coming back together for Sperta. They are both highly technical, confident in building and executing risk models, and ship software as fast as I’ve ever seen.

Increasingly more companies allow users to create accounts with wallets, apply for loans, make payments, and book transactions online. This requires secure integrations, ongoing compliance, API accessibility, and a rules engine to make sure you know who is going through your system, and why. I believe this need will increase 100-fold over the next five years, and 1000-fold over the next decade.

We’re so pleased to partner with Yifu and Ming on Sperta to take on this challenge, and hope you’ll follow along with them on the journey! They are, of course, hiring.