TECH START-UP: YOU CAN MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE

Post Covid-19, how are you thinking of empowering yourself?  Have you been laid off?  Furloughed? Told to work less hours?  Receiving less pay?  I hope the story below inspires you to start something for yourself.

Husayn Kassai, co-founded tech start-up Onfido with two university friends, his ambitious vision is to prevent identity fraud with cutting-edge technology.

University is not the most obvious place to start a multinational business – but for the three young partners behind the identity verification company Onfido, Oxford was where they hatched their winning idea.

Many university students dream of landing themselves a job at a big investment bank but Oxford graduate Husayn Kassai quit his job at Merrill Lynch in 2012 after just a week to focus on building a startup he’d co-founded at university.

After leaving Merrill Lynch, Kassai and co-founders Eamon Jubbawy, Ruhul Amin, who left their jobs at Credit Suisse and Mitsubishi UFJ Securities respectively, built Onfido into a basic working platform. “We worked for four or five months, talking to customers, and getting a minimum viable product,” said Kassai. “In January 2013, we got our first big customer, which was Hassle.”

That startup is background checking service Onfido; businesses that sign up to Onfido do so because it can help them to verify that future employees are who they say they are.

Prospective employees receive an automated email from Onfido asking them to provide proof that they, for example, hold a valid driving license or achieved straight As in their A-Levels. Onfido’s platform then automatically cross-checks these with the appropriate databases and reports back to the employer.

“I never full-heartedly went into [banking],” Kassai told Business Insider. “I was always looking for angel investment but I was just never able to get it.  “You think a bank has the smartest people in the world, and you walk in and the manager is using spreadsheets and Windows 95 and you’re thinking, ‘have I missed something here, what is wrong?'”

Kassai — who now employs people across offices in London, San Francisco, and Lisbon — was able to leave Merrill Lynch, the wealth management division of Bank of America, when he and his co-founders received a £12,000 investment loan from Oxford University fund Isis Innovation. He also had about £8,000 in personal savings but things were still tight at the time.

The trio were members of the Oxford Entrepreneurs society – which Mr Kassai, Onfido’s chief executive, says was much more than a side-hobby. “I dedicated just enough time to my economics and management course to not get kicked out,” he says, laughing.

“Although I found the work interesting, I was learning so much more by creating a start-up. I was putting my knowledge into practice – so it was much more tangible.”

And the need for effective identity verification was close to Mr Kassai’s heart. When he moved to the UK from Iran at the age of 10 with his family, he saw first-hand how problem-ridden the traditional process was.

“It doesn’t make much sense,” he says. “Currently our identification system is underpinned by credit bureaux, which centralise everyone’s personal data. The intention is to stop fraud, but they’re making it so much easier for fraudsters to steal people’s identities. This needed to change.”

Winning over investors

The technology behind Onfido was inspired by Mr Amin’s final-year thesis work, in which he developed a machine-learning tool that could spot wildlife in images of jungle scenes. The team realised that a similar machine learning system could be used to recognise people’s faces.

“Facial recognition is just pattern recognition,” Mr Kassai says. “As Onfido’s technology keeps learning, becoming stronger and more powerful, we’re able to service even larger clients.”

Even with a fantastic idea, the trio encountered a few obstacles to getting the business off the ground. Mr Kassai remembers some investors were wary about backing such a young, relatively inexperienced team – but this was not always a disadvantage.

One of Onfido’s earliest breaks came from a contact they had made through the Oxford Entrepreneurs – Brent Hoberman, lastminute.com co-founder. “We kept in touch for about 19 months,” says Mr Kassai. “I sent him updates about Onfido, and eventually he invited me to present it to him. He liked it, invested and connected us with quite a few other clients and entrepreneurs.”

Other investments have since come from Microsoft, Talis Capital, and more recently Softbank Investment and Salesforce. Big business leaders have not only put money into Onfido but also been willing to join its growing team.

Former managers at Google, Paypal and Salesforce are now in top roles at Onfido. “A company’s core value is the sum of its people,” says Mr Kassai. “We have a real mix of experiences, but the key thing for me is that people have a sense of hunger and ambition.”

Help from Hassle

Hassle is the on-demand cleaning service that was sold to Helpling in Germany for €32 million (£24 million). Its app allows people to quickly and easily find a cleaners that will come and clean their home or office.

“Up until that point we had 10 or so small web publishing companies. Without [Hassle] we probably wouldn’t be here today,” said Kassai. “They were demanding on the product. The others weren’t. Traditional corporates think it either does the job or it doesn’t.”

Hassle integrated Onfido’s API into its platform so that Hassle could vet everyone that wanted to be a cleaner without having to meet them all face-to-face. Business Insider understands that Hassle vetted tens of thousands of cleaners using Onfido’s platform.

Since launching their business in 2012, soon after graduation, co-founders Husayn Kassai, Eamon Jubbawy and Ruhul Amin have truly disrupted the way businesses authenticate their customers’ personal information. Their innovative machine-learning system has already attracted more than 1,500 clients, including Orange, Revolut and Monzo.

Driving forward

Though Onfido is still based in the UK, Mr Kassai now spends most of his time in its San Francisco office – and new offices are popping up around the globe. This means that the business benefits from global talent and diverse working cultures.

Mr Kassai’s advice to budding entrepreneurs is to “relentlessly focus on the problem you’re solving – and make sure it’s a real problem.

“Our company mission is to create an open worldwide verification entity, and empower consumers to own and control their legal identity – moving away from centralised credit-bureau databases to a world where people can decide which businesses they want to access their personal data.”

He says: “We see that as the future – and we’re now running pilots to show that.”

 References:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/