Payfone has raised $100 million to acquire strategic assets, strengthen its machine learning capabilities and drive growth the UK and Europe.

The investment was led by funds advised by Apax Digital, the growth equity team of Apax Partners. Managing partner Daniel O’Keefe and principal Zach Fuchs will join Payfone’s board of directors.

Also joining the investment round were new investors Sandbox Insurtech Ventures and Ralph de la Vega, the former vice chairman of AT&T. Existing investors MassMutual Ventures, Synchrony, Blue Venture Fund, Wellington Management, and former LexisNexis chief executive Andrew Prozes also participated.

The New York-based customer identity platform enables financial institutions, healthcare organisations and technology companies to bring speed and security to their onboarding, digital servicing and call centre processes.

Its authentication solutions, including the Trust Score tool, are built on 10 years of proprietary intelligence which lets it anonymously measure a phone number’s reputation and risk with real-time processing of behavioural signals. The platform instantly detects burner phones, spoofed calls, SIM swap fraud and synthetic identities, while removing friction from legitimate transactions.

Payfone also provides call verification solutions that run passively in the background of a phone call, allowing faster issue resolution.

Chief executive Rodger Desai commented: “The mobile phone is rapidly becoming the secure passport for navigating our digital lives - with one in three US consumers already authenticated by Payfone, this investment accelerates our ability to set the standard for the authentication process.

"As we build out a cross-industry consortium, more enterprises will be able to access Payfone’s real-time fraud and risk signals to prevent account takeovers while passing more transactions.”

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