🎡 Backing Ondorse
Overlooked #111
Hi, it’s Alexandre from Eurazeo (ex. Idinvest). I’m investing in seed & series A consumer and consumer enablers startups all over Europe. Overlooked is a weekly newsletter about venture capital and underrated consumer trends. Today, with Clément and Nicolas, we’re thrilled to share that we’re leading a €2.4m pre-seed round into Ondorse to sort-out business identity verification.
With Clément and Nicolas, we're delighted to partner with Aymeric and Florent in their journey to build Ondorse. Eurazeo is leading a €2.4m pre-seed round with the participation of Isai and a great line-up of business angels including Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier (Ibanfirst), Olivier Godement (Stripe) and Philippe de Passorio (Adyen). Ondorse is creating a new category by building an orchestration platform for business identity verification during the onboarding process and later during the regular identity checks of your customer base.
It's a massive pain for B2B businesses (fintech/crypto, B2B marketplaces, SaaS) to be compliant with all the regulations out there when onboarding new customers. It takes 1 month on average to perform a KYB. It involves several stakeholders: your compliance officer who wants to minimize risks, your sales person whose incentive is to convert a prospect into a customer and the customer himself who is pissed-off by the lengthy process. A good KYB requires to collect data from 10+ different sources or services (e.g. Onfido for identity verification, ComplyAdvantage for AML and PEP checks, official company registers for UBOs) and to follow certain rules implemented by your compliance department (e.g. we don't want to do business with the gambling industry or with Russia). Once the onboarding is done, you have to perform regular checks on your customer base to make sure that they're still compliant (e.g. checking if the company is not bankrupt, if the shareholding structure has not changed). Ondorse will help you streamline this onboarding and ongoing process with a single no-code platform where you can set up workflows and access a general compliance dashboard.
It's a pain point that we validated with (i) our portfolio companies and (ii) during our deep-dive into the broader identity space. We've also a strong conviction that we can build a multi-billion business in the identity category following the path of 0Auth, Okta or our portfolio company Onfido.
Florent and Aymeric are the perfect founders to tackle this issue. Florent started his career as a quantitative trader before launching his first startup called Bruno which is a consumer app to save money automatically. Aymeric worked as a lawyer at Skadden where he launched a practice in Europe around compliance for financial institutions and fintechs. They have the perfect track record combining entrepreneurship, finance and legal experiences.
Besides, we've been working together on Ondorse for a couple of months now. We’re truly impressed by their execution velocity and the market pull that they're having from leads who're craving for the product they're building.
Modern B2B companies are disrupting entire industries with consumer-grade experiences and are currently held back in their onboarding by convoluted compliance requirements. Ondorse will help them change the onboarding experience to raise it to the quality level of the product they're selling to their customers.
In the long-term, Ondorse will become an identity passport for B2B businesses. You will do your KYB once on Ondorse and later on you will be able to share your Ondorse identity wallet everywhere to remove friction in the onboarding process. Imagine Sign-in with Apple or Sign-in with Google but for B2B businesses.
Ondorse is hiring. You can check open-roles here. If you’re interested in joining them, please send me an email at adewez@eurazeo.com. Ondorse is also onboarding its first customers. If identity verification is a painful process for your business, you can reach them out at fr@ondorse.co and at ab@ondorse.co.
Thanks to Aymeric and Julia (🦒) for the feedback! Thanks for reading! See you next week for another issue! 👋