How Jumio Grew Identity Verification Revenue After Its 2016 Bankruptcy

Most interviews in this catalog are growth stories. This 2017 tape is a resurrection story, and it’s more instructive than most of the growth ones. In March 2016 Jumio, the identity-verification company backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Citi Ventures and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, filed its US business for Chapter 11 to sell its assets, and that May a court-approved auction handed substantially all of them to Centana Growth Partners, according to Jumio’s own releases. When CEO Stephen Stuut sat down with Nathan in 2017, he put the last quarter’s revenue at 47% above the same quarter a year earlier, and said Jumio had crossed 150,000 identity verifications in a single day the day before.

How fast Jumio was growing in 2017

Stuut gave no revenue total on the tape, only a rate, and he hedged it: “I think last quarter was a 47% revenue increase over the same quarter the previous year.” That is one quarter measured against the same quarter a year before, not an annual growth rate. Nathan’s recap moments later turned it into “about 46% year over year growth,” and the episode’s opening and closing summaries say “growing 46% year over year.” Stuut answered that recap, which bundled several figures at once, with “That’s correct,” but his own words were 47%, for one quarter. An earlier version of this post repeated the 46%. For context, Jumio’s own release of February 22, 2017 put its fiscal 2016 growth in annual recurring revenue at 44% year over year.

The volume figures were his own. Jumio processed “26,000,000” verifications in 2016. For 2017 he offered a guess, not a result: “My guess is closer to 30. I don’t... I haven’t got a forward forecast, but things are exploding.” He counted “anywhere from three fifty to 400 customers right now,” in “40 countries, four zero.”

One figure in the episode’s summaries does not hold up: the “team of 1,500.” That was Nathan’s sum (“So so total call it about 1,500”), which Stuut answered with “Correct.” His own parts were “about a 110, a 115 in the West” (up from “around 90, 95” when he arrived in 2015) and “now a thousand in India,” roughly 1,100 in all.

What Jumio actually does

Stuut broke the product into three checks: ID verification (is this passport or driver’s license fraudulent?), identity verification (a biometric comparison of your selfie against the photo on the ID: “Are you the same human, or did you steal it?”), and document verification (the utility bill or bank statement that know-your-customer rules demand). The customers were merchants who need trust at a distance. Airbnb was the one he would name (“I can name Airbnb because everybody knows about that one”), alongside airlines, online gaming companies, Bitcoin companies and brick-and-mortar banks with know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering requirements. And, in 2017’s detail of the year: “the Bitcoin market is going crazy, and we are quite, deeply enmeshed in their need to do know your customer AML requirements.”

The engineering answer to bad selfies was the part Stuut, an optical engineer by training who “designed laser weapons” earlier in his career, clearly relished:

If I said you can take a picture wherever, people take crappy pictures at Starbucks in bad lighting with a laptop that has a fixed focus camera. A computer vision cannot figure that out. Someday, maybe. … So we do both. We just make sure we get it right.

Stephen Stuut, CEO, Jumio, 2017

The business model: prepay and burn down

Contracts started at “probably on the order of $30,000,” which Stuut called “a let’s get you started kind of purchase” (below some minimum, he said, “you’re not worth the customer support effort”), and ran to “many multimillion dollar customers and a whole range in between.” Typically, customers paid a year’s worth of transactions in advance and burned off the inventory. Nathan put it to him that verifications processed was the one usage metric tied directly to revenue; Stuut answered “Absolutely.” He wouldn’t discuss per-check pricing (“That is competitive information that I don’t wanna disclose”), or even whether prices varied, but was blunt about the strategy: grab market share in a new space, where, “as far as I can tell,” Jumio was “anywhere from four to 10 times the size of the next biggest guy” and growing faster. Jumio got “a lot of inbound leads,” with Silicon Valley customers, Airbnb among “three or four of the top unicorns,” talking to each other about how they solved identity, backed by a direct sales force of “twenty, twenty five” people in San Francisco and London, plus partners.

The part the tape only hints at

Asked whether $60 million had been raised in total and he had come in with the last tranche, Stuut said: “Effectively. The history is more complicated than that, but that would be good enough.” He named Centana Growth Partners as “the actual largest investor at this point” and said “Millennium came in after that.” He did not mention the bankruptcy.

The public record fills it in. Daniel Mattes founded Jumio in 2010, Jumio said in January 2011. Saverin led a $6.5 million Series A in March 2011 and Andreessen Horowitz a $25.5 million Series B in March 2012; after a Citi Ventures strategic investment that May, Jumio said it had raised $35.4 million. Stuut’s “probably about 60,000,000” raised by the time he arrived is his estimate; the public record we found stops at that $35.4 million. Stuut was appointed CEO in June 2015, “brought in by the investors,” as he put it. According to the SEC, Jumio restated its financial results in 2015, “wiping out most of its revenue.” On March 21, 2016, Jumio said its US business had filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware to sell substantially all its assets, after “certain legacy issues combined with related government investigations and proceedings” had made it difficult to secure funding. Centana won the court-supervised auction, and on May 6, 2016 Jumio announced the sale, with all employees hired on current terms. On August 30, 2016 Jumio announced $15 million in financing from Centana and Millennium Technology Value Partners.

On April 2, 2019, the SEC charged Mattes with grossly overstating Jumio’s 2013 and 2014 revenues and making about $14 million by selling his own Jumio shares. Without admitting or denying the allegations, he agreed to pay more than $17 million, subject to court approval. Stuut was the CEO who carried the business through the filing and the sale.

• 2010 Daniel Mattes founds Jumio.
• 2011–2012 $6.5M Series A led by Eduardo Saverin (March 2011), $25.5M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz (March 2012), then a Citi Ventures strategic investment; $35.4M raised by May 2012, per Jumio.
• Jun 2015 Stephen Stuut appointed CEO.
• Mar 2016 Jumio’s US business files for Chapter 11 in Delaware to sell its assets.
• May 2016 Centana Growth Partners wins the court-approved auction for substantially all of Jumio’s assets.
• Aug 2016 $15M from Centana and Millennium Technology Value Partners.
• 2017 The tape (uploaded July 29, 2017): 47% revenue growth in the last quarter vs. the same quarter a year earlier, 150,000 verifications in a single day, 350–400 customers in 40 countries.
• Apr 2019 The SEC charges Mattes; he agrees to pay more than $17M without admitting or denying the allegations.
• Mar 2021 Great Hill Partners invests $150M.

The later record closes the arc. Great Hill Partners invested $150 million in March 2021, Jumio announced, and its January 18, 2022 release said annual revenue “more than doubled year over year in 2021.” GetLatka’s own profile carries a $42.4 million revenue figure dated September 2021, but no source is recorded for it and Jumio’s releases give rates, not dollar totals, so treat it as unconfirmed. Current numbers are on Jumio’s GetLatka profile, and the conversation itself is on the interview page.

One more thing hides in this episode. Late in the conversation, Nathan tells Stuut he is “actively building a tool which scrapes all of the audio data from these podcast interviews I do and makes it in a readable, almost like pitch book form.” Stuut, whose own competitive research meant studying what rival executives say on recordings like this one (“That’s a practice. It’s called Google.”), replies: “That’s interesting. Well, that will be helpful to me.” The tool got built. You’re reading it.

Stuut was 61 at the taping, married with four kids, and allowed one regret: “Travel just a little bit less when the kids are young.” Otherwise, “I wouldn’t change a lot from when I was 20. … I would do the same things over again.”