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Berbix

Summer 2018Acquired

Convert more verified users. Instantly & accurately validate user IDs.

Save
Berbix logo

Berbix

Summer 2018Acquired

Convert more verified users. Instantly & accurately validate user IDs.

Save
Company details

Berbix’s mission is to enable all individuals to prove who they are and control how their information gets shared. Founded by the former engineering and product leaders for Trust & Safety at Airbnb, we empower companies to confidently answer the question: “Are you who you say you are?"​

This is a question many online platforms need to answer about their users. We solve that problem by offering best-in-class ID verification and proprietary fraud detection technology to our customers, which they can access through developer friendly SDKs. We serve customers in a broad variety of industries, recently raised our Series A led by Mayfield, and are actively growing our all-star team.

Location
San Francisco, CA, USA
Founded
2018
Category
SaaS
YC Directory Pagewww.berbix.com
Founders
  • EL
    Eric Levine
    Founder
    X / TwitterLinkedIn
  • SK
    Steve Kirkham
    Founder
    LinkedIn

Berbix’s mission is to enable all individuals to prove who they are and control how their information gets shared. Founded by the former engineering and product leaders for Trust & Safety at Airbnb, we empower companies to confidently answer the question: “Are you who you say you are?"​

This is a question many online platforms need to answer about their users. We solve that problem by offering best-in-class ID verification and proprietary fraud detection technology to our customers, which they can access through developer friendly SDKs. We serve customers in a broad variety of industries, recently raised our Series A led by Mayfield, and are actively growing our all-star team.

Location
San Francisco, CA, USA
Founded
2018
Category
SaaS
YC Directory Pagewww.berbix.com
Founders
  • EL
    Eric Levine
    Founder
    X / TwitterLinkedIn
  • SK
    Steve Kirkham
    Founder
    LinkedIn

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On this page
  • Overview
  • Founding Story
  • Timeline
  • What They Built
  • Market Position
  • Target Customers
  • Market Size
  • Competition
  • Business Model
  • Traction
  • Post-Mortem
  • A strong component met a full-stack buying problem
  • Regulation turned workflow evidence into product surface
  • The adversary kept moving
  • The counter-case: this was a good exit
  • Key Lessons
  • Sources

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Exec Briefing

Actionable insights

If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about Berbix (S18).

  1. A component can win without owning the stack. Document forensics created strategic value, while the buyer controlled the identity graph, policy engine, and final decision.
  2. Developer ease opened the market. Immediate capture feedback, a few lines of integration, and usage pricing made an expert fraud system accessible to small product teams.
  3. Compliance became product surface. Biometric consent, retention, disclosure, and decision evidence expanded the job beyond recognizing a document.
  4. Adversaries renew the research bill. Every forged format, deepfake technique, injection path, and device change demands continuing model, data, and SDK work.
  5. Integration preserved the asset. The independent brand disappeared, but the patented forensics engine survived inside an active product; undisclosed ownership terms leave holder returns unknown.

Overview

Berbix turned the hardest step in online identity proofing into developer infrastructure. Founded in 2018 by former Airbnb Trust and Safety operators Eric Levine and Steve Kirkham, it let a company capture an ID and selfie, inspect the document, detect fraud, and return a result through an API.

Berbix produced a strategic exit. Socure bought it in June 2023 for approximately $70 million in cash and stock. The deal exposed the limit of Berbix's position: document verification could be excellent and still remain one step in a buyer's larger identity, fraud, consent, and decision workflow. Socure joined the component to an identity graph and orchestration platform, then launched Predictive DocV 3.0.[1]

Berbix co-founders Eric Levine and Steve Kirkham
Eric Levine and Steve Kirkham, the former Airbnb Trust and Safety operators who founded Berbix.

Image 1 / 1

Founding Story

Eric Levine and Steve Kirkham came to Berbix with unusually direct preparation. At Airbnb, both worked on Trust and Safety and helped build Verified ID, an early attempt to give hosts and guests confidence about who was on the other side of a transaction. Initialized Capital's Garry Tan described them as the team behind that feature when his firm led Berbix's $2.5 million seed round.[2]

The Airbnb experience supplied the product thesis. In his post-acquisition account, Levine wrote: "While we leveraged many of the best identity tools available at the time, we found that even the best left us wanting something with more reliability and better user experience."[3] Berbix would make the document check immediate, automated, and easy for a developer to add.

The founders incorporated that idea in 2018 and joined Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch.[4] The first product owned the complete capture flow. It checked image quality while the user was still present, identified the document type, decoded machine-readable fields, compared the document with known jurisdiction formats, and flagged convincing fakes. A customer could add standard ID checks with a few lines of code, then add a selfie and liveness step when the risk justified more friction.

Cannabis became an early wedge because online and delivery businesses needed to verify age without putting a clerk in front of every customer. The product also fit car rental, financial services, marketplaces, and nonprofits distributing funds. When the pandemic pushed more formerly in-person checks online, demand rose. Steve Kirkham told TechCrunch: "The inability to conduct traditional identity checks in person has forced organizations to move online for innumerable use cases."[5]

That demand supported a $9 million Series A led by Mayfield in August 2020. Initialized, Y Combinator, and Fika Ventures also participated. Berbix planned to hire across product and sales, localize the service, and keep improving fraud detection as forged documents evolved.[5]

Timeline

  • 2018: Levine and Kirkham founded Berbix and joined Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch.[4]
  • July 2019: Initialized announced that it led a $2.5 million seed round.[2]
  • August 2020: Mayfield led a $9 million Series A. Berbix said daily verification volume had reached the monthly volume it handled one year earlier.[5]
  • August 2022: A federal judge denied Berbix's motion to dismiss a proposed BIPA class action. The ruling tested whether the allegations were plausible; it did not decide liability.[6]
  • June 2023: Socure acquired Berbix for approximately $70 million in cash and stock and launched Predictive DocV 3.0 with the technologies integrated.[1]
  • September 2023: Berbix's virtual authentication detection received a patent after its integration into Socure DocV.[7]
  • 2026: Socure continues to ship Predictive DocV changes, including injection detection, digital-signature validation, and updated consent language.[8]

What They Built

Berbix sold an identity-verification session. A customer created a transaction through the API and sent the end user into a hosted or embedded capture flow. The user chose an ID type, photographed the document, and could complete a selfie or liveness check. The service returned extracted fields and a verification result. The published mobile demo shows that sequence without the customer having to design its own camera or review interface.[9]

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