Acuant Announces the Acquisition of Hello Soda to Strengthen Its Trusted Identity Platform and Global Position in Digital Identity

The acquisition follows the company’s best quarter in history with record revenue

Acuant, the global trusted identity platform for fraud prevention and AML compliance,  announced the completion of the acquisition of Hello Soda as part of their continued investment and commitment to innovative technology.  Hello Soda is a global provider of identity verification and KYC solutions headquartered in the UK with focus on the European and Asian markets. Along with the company’s deep expertise in eMoney and gaming, with customers including VirginBet, Klarna and Paysafe, the union will bring together powerful technology and data science capabilities that are key to unlocking trust in digital identities.

“Our goal has always been to power trust for all, a vision we share with Hello Soda whom we are excited to welcome to the Acuant family,” said Yossi Zekri President and CEO of Acuant.  “This is truly the most exhilarating time in our company’s history, coinciding with the disruption of traditional financial markets, the rapid digitalization of the world and the need for business and governments to help safeguard identity more than ever before. Adding Hello Soda to our Trusted Identity Platform will reach more people today and position us even stronger for the future of digital identity.”

Hello Soda’s foundation in advanced analytics has driven its success in developing and delivering to market, a suite of solutions that leverage digital data sources and capabilities for the purpose of KYC and AML. With a strong focus on ensuring businesses receive actionable insight, Hello Soda’s technology utilizes proprietary analytics, matching algorithms and data science modelling to provide configurable and composite scoring, enabling businesses to make trusted decisions from the point of onboarding to enhanced due diligence (EDD) and continuous monitoring. Their leading dark web solution mitigates the risk of impersonation fraud by searching over 600 million records on the dark web for a customer’s information and provides an extra level of security by searching and monitoring customer PII against compromised data. Its innovative and multilingual platform has enabled Hello Soda to become a market leader in automated identity solutions, currently verifying identities in over 180 countries.

“We could not be happier to join Acuant, bringing our talent, technology, network and expertise to strengthen all we have accomplished and to take our mutual vision further as a team,” stated James Blake, Founder and CEO of Hello Soda. “Our combined technology will serve us well in our joint mission to democratize trust and provide solutions to reach every sector of the global population, allowing every individual to conduct trusted transactions when and where they wish.”

Acuant Experiences Record Growth

The acquisition comes on the heels of Acuant’s best quarter in company history and groundbreaking accomplishments:

Robust Growth: In Q1 2021, Acuant saw record revenue with over 30% growth YOY and ARR up over 60%, compliance revenue (with the acquisition of IdentityMind AML solutions in 2020) also grew over 170% YOY; adding several key new hires, total headcount grew over 30% YOY; the company welcoming dozens of new partners (including Refinitiv, Unisys, CoreSE and Albo) and had noticeable business spikes in healthcare and cryptocurrency verticals.

Patented Technology: This quarter, Acuant was awarded Patent # 10,931,461  and 10,965,668
the USPTO both for system and methods relating to digital identity verification (adding to patent
10,872,338); the company also celebrated hitting over 450M digital identities being created with their patented eDNA®).

Enhanced Global Coverage & Technology Partners: Along with the industry’s largest ID library (6k+ templates), Acuant has expanded its leading third-party data ecosystem to expand offerings and increase global coverage for verification to reaching more of the world’s population without physical IDs and/or smart devices.

Industry Leadership: Acuant has joined the Digital ID and Authentication Council of Canada (DIACC), Open Identity Exchange (OIX) and The Investing and Savings Alliance (TISA) to expand its membership of working groups such as the Document Security Alliance (DSA) and Association of Document Validation Professionals (ADVP), among others, and continues to meet INCITS, ICAO, NIST and ISO standards, and is in on track for FedRAMP certification in 2021. The Company continues to be the gold standard with PCI, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications and is on track for FedRAMP certification in 2021. Acuant works to meet with INCITS, ICAO and NIST standards and puts privacy first and puts consumers in control of their identity (see their latest with Microsoft in Verifiable Credentials).