Trinsic raises $8.5 million to build user-controlled identity products
Trinsic announced an $8.5M seed round led by Georgian with participation from Jon Gelsey (Founding CEO, Auth0), Frederic Kerrest (Executive Vice Chairman, Co-founder & COO, Okta), Kickstart Seed Fund, Founder’s Co-op, Osage Venture Partners, Forward VC, and a dozen additional angel investors.
The round is the largest of its kind in the decentralized identity category to date.
“Humanity is sending people to space, editing genes, and developing AI that can write better blog posts than I can,” said Riley Hughes, co-founder and CEO of Trinsic. “Yet, I still can’t even prove my legal name is Riley Hughes – let alone anything else about myself – digitally. Decentralized identity will finally solve this. We’re fortunate to have a front-row seat as our customers and partners bring that future a step closer to reality.”
While decentralized identity is in high demand, developers face a dizzying number of standards to be compatible with—“SoulBound Tokens” and “Web5” being the latest additions to the litany of W3C, ISO, and other industry-specific standards. Trinsic offers teams a single API that acts as an abstraction layer that bridges ecosystems, strips complexity away from the development process, and ensures products are future-proof.
Dozens of banks, insurance companies, automobile brands, governments, and startups are building user-controlled identity products on Trinsic’s platform. These products are collectively used by over 100,000 end users, up over 10x in the last year. The company expects its rapid growth to continue as its customers realize the value in making identity data reusable across contexts.
“As we dug into the decentralized identity market, Trinsic kept coming up as the leaders,” explained Tyson Baber, lead investor at Georgian. “Our R&D team had built a proof-of-concept using Trinsic before we were even introduced. Having first-hand knowledge of the product’s quality, coupled with the team’s vision for building a network of verified, user-controlled data, made partnering with Trinsic an easy decision.”
Trinsic plans to use this new capital to expand its team and accelerate its vision to make digital identity as widely adopted as credit cards.