CertifID Receives $1.7M in Seed Financing
February 22, 2018
CertifID, an authentication software addressing the increasing threat of wire fraud, raised $1.7 million in its seed round of financing.
The round was led by Grand Rapids based Wakestream Ventures and included several prominent angel investors.
“During our diligence process we heard so many horror stories, events where people involved in real estate transactions, who, through no fault of their own, were victims of aggressive hackers, able to hack into the wire transfer process and steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from unsuspecting individuals,” said Wakestream founder Rick DeVos. “The problem has grown into a multi-billion dollar epidemic over the last few years. CertifID not only offers a secure authentication process, but is the first and only company we are aware of that insures each and every transaction.”
CertifID was founded in 2017 by Thomas Cronkright II, Lawrence Duthler, owners and founders of Sun Title, and Tyler Adams, a digital product and branding expert.
In 2015, Sun Title fell victim to a social engineering fraud that cost the company nearly $200,000. The fraud, which stemmed from an elaborate transaction scheme that took place over two months. In order to prevent future fraud events, the pair developed CertifID, a wire fraud prevention platform designed to authenticate the identities of transactional parties and share banking information securely. CertifID uses proprietary digital device analysis and knowledge-based authentication sequencing and provides a guarantee up to $500,000.
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