BlockScore (YC S14) Lands $2M In Funding For Making I.D. Verification Easier | Hacker News Reader

BlockScore (YC S14) Lands $2M In Funding For Making I.D. Verification Easier

techcrunch.com

46 pointsvollmarj14 comments

I'd love this for a special case -- account recovery. A system where your account is only as secure as a recovery email address and/or knowledge based authentication and/or social engineering of an account-reset staffer is pretty insecure.

Front loading that on new account creation is pretty dumb commercially, though, especially for low end services or non-financial services. You should do something with trivial signup and then progressive authentication. A holistic risk thing vs. binary.

Account recovery is a great use case. Any mission critical applications for businesses should require more than security questions or a phone call in order to gain access to accounts.

We agree that front-loading is not always the best solution and are working on systems to help firms with progressive authentication, too.

This is really cool and I have a possible startup opportunity that could use this.

One question if there's anyone from BlockScore listening–I've seen some finance/bitcoin startups that require you to upload a picture of your ID with your webcam via WebRTC. Does BlockScore have anything like this in the works? I think a drop-in JS library for this would be really useful.

I was wondering about this too. I'm looking for a system that verifies uploaded identity documents, but it seems like BlockScore doesn't do that and only focuses on knowledge based authentication.

Does anyone have recommendations for companies that provides identity document verification, ideally in addition to knowledge based authentication? (one that I recently spoke with is Jumio, but they don't have a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which I really prefer)

Edit: to the BlockScore team - any chance you might support that in the future?

We do work with document collection/verification systems to verify information extracted from the documents. You still have to verify the information that those systems return against watchlists and other database, and BlockScore is the easiest way to be compliant. Send me an email and we can chat about your specific needs. support@blockscore

BlockScore founder here. We considered it early on but found that our customers are phasing out collecting identity documents if they have not already.

At Starup Weekend Seattle last summer, my team and I built this exact product. Seriously, down to the last detail. Obviously it was a prototype but the pieces were all there.

Our business pitch was to focus on developers for easy integration. Out of sixty participants, we won best pitch judged by our peers, but didn't even place top 3 with the judges (VC's plus CEOs), who could not see how this was a "defensible" idea. Their issue was that these knowledge based questions (called "wallet questions" -- multiple choice, like "what street did you live on in 2005?) were from public data sources, and therefore, not "defensible." In the judges minds, any large company like Transunion could replicate this business fairly trivially.

I argued then, and I'll argue now, that there's a lot to be said for first mover advantage, developer friendliness, and a small, agile engineering team to back it up. Sure, all those data sources are public. But the existing API's for accessing them really suck. Transunion and other incumbent competitors have shown no indication that they're capable of improving upon those API's. Even if they did, it would only be out of reaction to a company like this, and at that point the battle for developers is already lost.

Best of luck to this team. With the YC name and a developer friendly approach, I maintain that this product has a very good shot at profitability. Its customers are developers, and you can charge a nominal fee per check, because those developers are likely building a product that profits per customer. So these guys can go after tens, or hundreds, of developers, but reach potentially hundreds of thousands of customers. It's a great business model.

This story also goes to show that ideas are a some a dozen. It's the execution, team, and positioning that will determine success. Good luck!

Does this have anything to do with bitcoin/block chain?

They help with KYC/id verification. Originally bitcoin companies were their target market.

What are their competitors? I think LifeLock is doing something similar.

Jumio. Uses upload of passport though.

Jumio is actually a complementary service to ours. Jumio pulls information off of identification, but the information is not verified. You can use us to verify and authenticate that information.

IDology and the major credit reporting agencies (experian, equifax, and transunion).

it's BlockScore from startup engineering on coursera..

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