Toronto-born financial technology startup Qui Identity has officially emerged from stealth following a seed round.
The $6.5 million in seed funding was led by Round13 Digital Asset Fund, with participation from Wittington Ventures, OMERS Ventures, and private investors.
Qui Identity was founded by Kirk Simpson, co-founder of Wave, and Peter Carrescia, formerly senior Vice President of Strategy at Wave. Founded in 2010, Wave was acquired by H&R Block for US$400 million in 2019.
Qui wants to reinvent how trusted interactions take place for each of us. Based on decentralized identity standards, the startup is building infrastructure to allow individuals and companies to instantly exchange verified identity information.
“There’s been a lot of great progress on standards and protocols around decentralized identity,” says Simpson. “With Qui, we’ll move toward mass adoption, providing individuals with control and privacy, while ensuring a high level of security and trust is maintained.”
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Know-Your-Customer onboarding processes for financial service products “is an obvious example,” he offers, “but there are many others.”
In today’s world, you make claims about your identity all the time, both in the digital and physical world, to secure access to products and services. Your identity extends beyond traditional attributes like your name, your address, your image and your education, to include memberships you hold and things you own, both physical and digital.
“User-controlled decentralized identity is the basis of the important next step forward in how people manage, share, and control their identity,” Simpson affirms.
Increasingly, people are exposing more personal data than they need to, and companies are spending more, and accepting more friction, to confirm this data.
“The benefits of decentralized identity are clear and its adoption is inevitable,” Carrescia agrees. “Implementing some of the recent advancements in the space, Qui will provide technologies and user experiences that scale elegantly across countless use cases.”
Qui is using seed funding to expand its global team, including technologists with expertise in decentralized identity, web3 and mobile.
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