Onfido

Overview

Onfido was a London-based identity-verification company founded in 2012 by three University of Oxford students — Husayn Kassai, Eamon Jubbawy and Ruhul Amin — that used artificial intelligence to read a person’s identity documents and match them against facial biometrics, letting people prove who they are online without an in-person check (TechCrunch; Electronic Specifier). It raised $200 million, grew to more than 500 employees and 1,200 customers, and was acquired by Entrust in April 2024 on undisclosed terms (TechCrunch; SourceSecurity).

This profile covers the independent Onfido that existed from 2012 to 2024 — not the Entrust product line that succeeded it — and traces how a student project became one of the United Kingdom’s most successful university spinouts.

An Oxford student startup with a moonshot idea

Onfido was one of the first entrants into Oxford University Innovation’s Incubator in 2012, the entrepreneurship programme that nurtured the technology developed by student founders Kassai, Jubbawy and Amin (Electronic Specifier). In 2013, while studying at Saïd Business School, the team received £20,000 in early-phase funding through the Entrepreneurship Centre’s Oxford Seed Fund (Electronic Specifier). Kassai later described building a new way to verify identities online in 2012, at age 22, as feeling like “a moonshot,” and credited Oxford Innovation’s first incubator as a crucial launchpad “not only for the company but for our confidence” (Electronic Specifier).

The product was deliberately simple at the point of use: a photo of an identity document and a short video of the individual, with AI reading the document and using facial recognition and other datapoints to verify the person (TechCrunch). Its customers were any organization running parts of its processes virtually — major banks, government bodies and businesses doing recruitment, plus rapidly scaling companies that needed to add drivers and workers while passing safety checks (TechCrunch). Kassai’s pitch was that “identity is broken and needs fixing,” and Onfido’s ambition grew into building an alternative identity-verification layer for the internet that could replace credit bureaus, Facebook logins and other established channels (TechCrunch).

Funding followed that ambition. A $100 million round led by TPG Growth in April 2020 — following a $50 million round about a year earlier that included Microsoft, Salesforce and SBI — brought Onfido’s total raised to $200 million (TechCrunch). The company planned to use the money to expand its existing business, which was growing especially strongly in the United States, to build out the identity layer, and to pursue pandemic-era use cases from virtual voting to passport and visa applications and privacy-preserving contact tracing (TechCrunch). Its investor roster by exit also included the University of Oxford, SBI Investment, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Salesforce Ventures, Bain Capital and TPG Growth (Electronic Specifier).

The Entrust acquisition: scale, deepfakes and a record Oxford return

By the time Entrust completed its acquisition in April 2024, Onfido had grown into a 500-strong team with more than £140 million in revenue and customers worldwide (Electronic Specifier). SourceSecurity’s account of the completed deal put the scale in dollars: over $140 million in annual revenue, more than 500 employees, and over 1,200 customers globally spanning financial institutions, e-commerce, gambling and gaming companies and sharing-economy platforms (SourceSecurity). The timing reflected an AI-driven fraud surge: Onfido had seen a 3,000% increase in deepfakes and a fivefold increase in forged identities over the prior year, and its liveness-detection technology — built to spot deepfakes, video spoofs and masks — had prevented over $6 billion in potential fraud in the prior eighteen months (SourceSecurity).

For Oxford, the sale was a landmark: it marked the highest-value return on investment for a student-led startup in the university’s history, an 80-times return on the Oxford Seed Fund’s £20,000, with proceeds reinvested into creating more companies and entrepreneurship programmes (Electronic Specifier). Entrust’s chief executive Todd Wilkinson said Onfido brought “the world’s best-in-class ID verification team, capabilities, and tech stack,” and noted Entrust’s tech centres in Cambridge and now in London with Onfido (Electronic Specifier). The acquisition also scattered Onfido’s people across the fintech ecosystem: James Baston-Pitt, formerly a vice president at Onfido, joined Alloy as EMEA Director of Growth at its UK launch (BusinessMole).

What this profile does not claim

• The acquisition price was never officially disclosed and is not stated here; figures circulating in press reports rest on unnamed sources and were not verified in a fully-read source.
• This profile does not describe the post-acquisition product (sold under Entrust’s branding) in detail, because that status appears only in vendor-review pages not read in full; it claims only the completed acquisition and the folding of Onfido’s technology into Entrust’s portfolio, which the sources read support.
• The £140 million revenue figure comes from Oxford’s account of the exit and the $140 million figure from SourceSecurity; the two are reported in different currencies and are not treated as the same number.
• Founding-month and incorporation details from tertiary material are deliberately left out; only the founding year 2012 is claimed.