On Tuesday, Austin-based identity management startup Verifiable announced it raised $3 million in funding, as first reported by TechCrunch.
The company offers an API that healthcare organizations can use to check the credentials of doctors, nurses, therapists and more. Verifiable integrates with hundreds of state and federal databases to monitor the records of up to 17 million providers, and consolidates the data into a single platform. Customers like TalkSpace rely on the startup to alert them when it’s time for a staff member to renew their professional certification, as well as use the platform to spotlight staff controversies reported to industry oversight bodies. The company works with blockchain startup Dock to anchor its findings to a decentralized public ledger.
Verifiable launched out of the Y Combinator accelerator in August and, at the time, said it was already monitoring the credentials of more than 50,000 healthcare providers. The company is the brainchild of Nick Macario, an entrepreneur who previously founded digital identity startup branded.me. In 2017, Macario merged branded.me with another identity management business to form Remote.com, a startup that ran background checks and verified employee credentials for HR departments.
It was through this venture that he realized how fragmented the process of verifying healthcare providers’ credentials was — an issue that has been exacerbated by the healthcare labor shortage during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re at an inflection point with healthcare,” Macario told TechCrunch. “There are large volumes of healthcare verifications and certifications that are being verified manually ... and the lack of infrastructure and credentialing is a big part of the bottleneck holding healthcare back.”
Verifiable isn’t the only identity management platform to experience increased interest recently.
Last week, the Palo Alto-based Jumio reported its largest sales quarter in company history, and CNBC reported that the San Francisco-based Okta’s revenue was up 70 percent year over year.
