区块链金融数据安全 Spring Labs获融$1475万

- 网安创企融资/投资人合作 加微junshao -

【180327 Forbes】Spring Labs, a Los Angeles startup that aims to help financial institutions with identity verification, raised $14.75 million in early-stage investment. Venture firm August Capital led the seed funding round. Other investors included GreatPoint Ventures, Jump Capital, private equity firm Victory Park Capital and crypto asset manager Multicoin Capital.

The $15 million haul is a hefty sum for a company that just started four months ago and doesn’t yet have a working product. “Spring Labs is pursuing a potentially huge market,” a spokesperson says, adding that it’s building technology “that requires a world-class engineering team.” August Capital general partner Eric Carlborg says the founding team’s experience drove his confidence more than any other factor. Investor interest also affected the funding round’s large size. “There is a lot of interest in blockchain right now,” he notes. “That does give them the luxury of being able to raise money.” Spring Labs is August Capital’s first blockchain startup investment.

Before starting Spring Labs, cofounder and CEO Adam Jiwan spent 10 years working in investment management, with stints at George Soros’ family office and the hedge fund TPG-Axon Capital Management. He then started investing in financial services companies like Avant, an online lender that targets middle-income consumers and has been valued at over $1 billion. Jiwan cofounded Spring Labs with two former executives from Avant—former chief risk officer John Sun and chief compliance officer Anna Fridman. And Avant CEO Al Goldstein is on Spring Labs' board.

One problem the startup is trying to solve is financial data security. Last year’s Equifax hack may have affected nearly 150 million consumers, and Spring Labs wants to use blockchain technology to create a more secure data platform that exists on a distributed ledger, where multiple companies and individuals maintain replicas of a network, preventing the single-point-of-failure architecture present in the Equifax hack.

It’s also addressing inefficiency. Today, when consumers apply for loans, companies must verify their identity through a series of “manual, repetitive processes,” Jiwan says, such as buying and analyzing reports from credit bureaus. The credit application process for consumers is also clunky—to qualify for Citi’s Double Cash card, some consumers must mail copies of three separate documents, such as a pay stub, credit card bill and phone bill. Spring Labs’ blockchain platform, the Spring Network, aims to streamline such processes by getting financial institutions to share identity data with each other in a secure way.

Jiwan cites a hypothetical example of how the Spring Network, which will launch publicly in 2019, would work: If JPMorgan were trying to verify John Doe, a potential customer, it could check the network to see if any other banks had previously verified him. If Bank of America had recently done so, it could share data with JPMorgan to help. But why would Bank of America want to share notes with a competitor? Because JPMorgan would pay Bank of America in cryptocurrency for its assistance, and Bank of America could share the data through “attestation”—in a way that doesn’t reveal any personally identifiable data about John Doe.

Verification and identity is a hot sector in the blockchain world. High-profile crypto projects Civic and Bloom are working on creating new blockchain-based identities for people, to power faster and more secure verification. Spring Labs isn’t creating new identities—it’s trying to help existing financial institutions with parts of the identity-verification process. For example, in addition to building its blockchain platform for banks to plug into, it could build and sell tools to help those banks meet federal “Know Your Customer” (KYC) and “Anti-Money Laundering” (AML) regulations. In the long run, Spring Labs could also compete head-to-head with credit bureaus like Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

Will Spring Labs have its own token? This is 2018—of course it will. The coin will be used as a medium of exchange so that institutions or individuals sharing data on the network can compensate each other. Jiwan says he won’t use a mainstream cryptocurrency like ether for payments because he doesn’t want external factors (like ether’s volatility) to affect the Spring Network ecosystem.

The Spring Network will start as a “permissioned” blockchain where only certain trusted financial institutions can join the network to see and share data. Avant is the first company to participate, and Spring Labs says it will announce others in the coming months. Over time, as more institutions join, Jiwan says he’ll open it up as a public blockchain, allowing individuals to share credit data about themselves and gain more control over their identity profiles, such as being able to flag inaccuracies.

更多网安创投资讯                                   

【每周五为您同步全球网安投融大事】