Payfone raises $100 million led by Apax Digital Fund

NY-based Prove  has raised $100 million led by funds advised by Apax Digital, the growth equity team of Apax Partners.

Founded in 2008, Payfone operates in the space of digital identity verification and authentication. Its customer identity platform enables financial institutions, healthcare organizations and technology companies to bring speed and security to their onboarding, digital servicing and call center processes.

Payfone’s authentication solutions, including its unique Trust Score™ tool, are built on ten years of proprietary phone intelligence that enable Payfone to anonymously measure a phone number’s reputation and risk with real-time processing of behavioral signals. Payfone’s platform instantly detects burner phones, spoofed calls, real-time SIM swap fraud, and synthetic identities, while removing friction from legitimate transactions. Payfone also provides call verification solutions that run passively in the background of a phone call, allowing faster issue resolution.

“The mobile phone is rapidly becoming the secure passport for navigating our digital lives. With one in three US consumers already authenticated by Payfone, this investment accelerates our ability to set the standard for the authentication process. As we build out a cross-industry consortium, more enterprises will be able to access Payfone’s real-time fraud and risk signals to prevent account takeovers while passing more transactions.” – Rodger Desai, CEO of Payfone.

Joining the investment round are new investors Sandbox Insurtech Ventures and Ralph de la Vega, the former Vice Chairman of AT&T. Existing investors MassMutual Ventures, Synchrony, Blue Venture Fund, Wellington Management LLP, and former CEO of LexisNexis Andrew Prozes also participated.