If you've ever applied for a mortgage or apartment, you know that companies collect a lot more information than they need to determine if you can afford the monthly payments. The application process often involves pages of data about you and your life, but what if companies were able to get just the data they needed in a secure way?
Footprint is an early-stage startup that wants to change the way companies collect information and help consumers control their own data. A $6 million seed investment has been made by the startup.
The final identity form that consumers will ever fill out is Footprint. Footprint is a small amount of code for enterprises. It gives our customers the ability to both onboard users and do account creation or 'know your customer' (KYC) and off the cost and risk of all of the security that has to happen around storing that data.
The goal of the company is to create a tool that is similar to Apple wallet, but for your data, so it would hold your private information in an secure format. Footprint holds consumer credentials, such as Social Security number, date of birth, email, phone number, in a protected "secure enclave", backed by hardware-level cryptanalysis.
The company uses Face ID or Touch ID on your phone to access and share your information with trusted partners.
The image is called Footprint.
On the back end, the company is taking advantage of the idea of secure enclaves, which was originally developed by Amazon Web Services. To get into a bar, someone must be over 21.
You don't have to do that computation and application code if you don't want to. He said that you can do it inside of the secure enclave, and that they only give you the minimum amount of information you need. There are more advantages to that approach.
We have very fine-grained audit logging because of this singular secure path. Who is decoding what data? We can give them the data if they allow it. We can block them if they aren't allowed to. Everything is being recorded in a single log.
Wachs explained that the company can collect and store name, email, phone number, date of birth, address, Social Security number with the option to add things such as verify an income source and verify a business that you own. The goal is to be able to handle all of the data you would need to apply for an apartment and remove all of the hassle associated with the current paper-based systems most companies are still using.
A company with smart founders trying to solve a difficult problem in an industry with a lot of room to grow is what Shardul Shah believes.
There is a lot of commercial activity surrounding the industry, but it is fundamentally broken. There is a trade-off to be made. You can either be low or high. Alex and Eli share the same point of view so you can deliver both of them. Shah said that you can be easy to use and accurate.
Wachs believes that diversity is an important value for the startup as it grows. Diversity is very important to us. We are proud of the team that doesn't look like us. The only two people on the team are us. If it is not a priority from the start, then a lot of companies make big diversity hiring efforts when they are later stages.
The product is currently in early access and will be available in the fall.
The $6 million investment was led by IndexVentures with participation from industry angels, as well as Box Group, Operator Partners, Lerer Hippeau, Palm Tree Crew, Not Boring Capital and K5.
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