Merit raises $50 million to expand into new business lines and use cases

Verified identity platform Merit has raised $50M in Series B funding, bringing the total raised to date to $80M.

Rose Park Advisors led the round with previous investors a16z, Bow Capital, and Govtech Fund participating, and Experian Ventures, Spike Ventures, InState Capital, Ricardo Villela Marino, Jaan Tallinn’s Metaplanet Holdings, Ram Shriram, and others joining as new investors.

Merit has built a platform for capturing and enabling the value of verified identity, helping organizations coordinate people at scale by removing the need for a personal connection to create trust.

More than 2,000 private, state, and municipal organizations are already participating in the ecosystem and relying on Merit to help solve critical real-world problems across workforce development, emergency services, licensing, education, defense readiness, and other sectors.

• In the Commonwealth of Virginia, professional licenses sent by the Virginia Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation are available to more than 300,000 regulants across more than 40 industries as digital, portable, accessible merits.
• In Florida, in partnership with the Division of Emergency Management during the aftermath of the tragic surfside condominium collapse, Merit’s Verified Identity platform was relied on for complete personnel management, including responder registration, badging, and access control based on configurable policies, ultimately counting more than 16,000 check-ins in one month.
• BARBICIDE has partnered with Merit to provide digital credentials to beauty professionals worldwide, exceeding two million digital, portable, shareable merits sent to date through Merit’s verified identity platform.

“Merit is a platform in the truest sense – we want to create value for everyone that uses it, including helping public and private-sector organizations deliver on their promise to engage and serve, providing their constituents and customers new value and tools for their hard-earned credentials, and giving developers access to build applications on top of Merit,” said CEO Tomer Kagan. “With this additional capital and strong new investors, Merit will expand into new business lines and use cases, and continue to build an ecosystem that allows entire industries to operate programmatically and reliably with trust, insight, and efficiency.”

“We believe Merit’s disruptive business model, enabled by its digital infrastructure for verified identity, provides easy-to-use solutions for customers at lower cost and greater accessibility than what is available on the market today,” explained Matt Christensen, CEO and Managing Partner of Rose Park Advisors. “Merit delivers value to customers in novel ways, which value increases with usage and scale. We are pleased to support the Merit team as their growth accelerates.”