Merit: Universal Verified Identity Platform
Merit’s platform helps users create, update, and share secure, portable credentials
Digital identity is a catch-all term for anything in a digital format, such as creating a PDF of an existing paper-based license or credential. While digital identity is becoming commonplace in many business environments, the conversion process still relies on human intervention to collect, convert, and store the records — resulting in the potential for manual mistakes. As a result, the need to rapidly and efficiently verify identification and certification is a global challenge in almost every industry.
Alumni Ventures portfolio company Merit addresses this need by offering a universal clearinghouse for verified identity. Merit provides licensing and certification verifications for everyone from architects to real estate and construction professionals, IT techs, plumbers, electricians, emergency responders, and more. Agencies and industries benefit by having a common standard to check credentials and compare qualifications, while individuals benefit by having all their achievements in one secure place.
Merit’s business model is based on a “land and expand” strategy, with government use cases expanding into other projects. For example, Merit was brought into Florida to help coordinate identity for vaccines. Later (based on the success of the vaccination project), the company was asked to coordinate onsite recovery for the Surfside condo collapse.
What We Liked About Merit
Backed by Established Investors: From the start, Merit has been backed by Jeff Jordan at Andreessen Horowitz. Jeff is a Midas List investor with investments in Airbnb and Pinterest. The lead investor for the company’s latest round is Rose Park Advisors, founded by the late HBS professor Clayton Christensen (a former advisor to Alumni Ventures’ CEO Mike Collins). Rose Park’s investments include Coupang and DocuSign.
Strong Market and Growing Potential: The press attention that Merit has generated from government projects has translated to significant commercial interest from customers in the private sector, making them well-positioned to disrupt the global identity verification market (expected to reach $18.6 billion by 2026). Additionally, Merit is in the process of shifting to annual contracts where the local government will pay for yearly usage upfront, thus increasing recurring revenue.
Significant Customer Demand: Merit’s identity verification platform spans many use cases and has seen high interest from state and local governments. With impressive performance that met the challenges of the pandemic, Merit has shown significant growth and strong customer demand. As a result, the company serves 1,500 trusted private, state, and municipal organizations to solve critical real-world problems in multiple sectors.
How We Are Involved
Spike Ventures (for the Stanford community), Waterman Ventures (for the Brown community), and 116 Street Ventures (for the Columbia community) deployed capital in Merit’s $50 million Series B led by Rose Park Advisors. The company is also in AV’s AI Fund, and part of the allocation was raised via a Syndication.
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