Trooly Raises $10M Series A from Bain Capital Ventures

6/21/16

Who says a perfect stranger can’t be perfect?Trooly has launched a breakthrough Instant Trust™ rating service that helps businesses verify, screen and predict trustworthy relationships and interactions. The service is designed to fill a “trust gap” caused by the speed of modern commerce and community, which requires instant evaluation of potential reward and risk – without the trust-building interaction history and feedback loops that people use to evaluate relationships offline.

Trooly’s Instant Trust rating has been proven in real-world deployments by the world’s largest peer-to-peer marketplaces and financial institutions. It can also help marketers and employers across all industries. Trooly’s target markets represent $9.2 billion in relevant trust, risk and safety data spend, based on third-party estimates. Use cases include:

Peer-to-peer marketplaces and communities looking to screen potential users – weeding out bad behavior that threatens service reputation as they scale their platforms quickly with thousands of new customers every day;
Financial institutions that need rich data and modern tools to verify customer identity, manage compliance, and evaluate risk for lending, insurance and other financial relationships; and Marketers and recruiters who want deeper intelligence to evaluate the risk and reward of customer/prospect and employee/candidate relationships.

“In business as in life, trust is the cornerstone of all relationships,” said Savi Baveja, co-founder and CEO of Trooly. “But how do we know if someone is worthy of our trust? We need new mechanisms to make faster, more informed decisions. Trooly’s Instant Trust rating uses machine learning to deliver rich insight quickly based on billions of public and permissible data sources – moving well beyond old-school background checks, credit scores and risk management tools.”

Trooly’s Instant Trust rating service was developed over the past two years by experienced business and technology leaders from Google, Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn and Bain & Company. Trooly announced today that it has raised $10 million in funding through a recent Series A investment by Bain Capital Ventures and Milliways Ventures, and an earlier seed investment from Milliways. The company is led by co-founders Savi Baveja (chief executive officer), Dr. Anish Das Sarma (chief technology officer) and Dr. Nilesh Dalvi (chief science officer).

“Trooly has built an impressive service that demonstrates the full potential of machine learning,” said Ajay Agarwal, managing director of Bain Capital Ventures. “They’re not simply using data to automate an existing process. They’re addressing an entirely new need – one that’s particularly critical for today’s financial institutions and peer-to-peer marketplaces. We’re excited to help Savi and team grow the business.”

“Trooly is exactly the kind of company we love to fund – deep computer science with big impact,” said Anand Rajaraman, partner at Milliways Ventures. “We’re thrilled to see the progress Trooly has made since our seed investment two years ago. Their vision and technology have been proven in some of the most cutting-edge customer environments. Now it’s time to scale the business and deepen Trooly’s reach across customers and use cases.”

Trooly’s Instant Trust rating evaluates multiple dimensions of trust – mining real-time data to evaluate identity, personality and behavior against well-established academic and commercial models. The trust rating is based on patented innovation* and breakthrough computer science research in areas such as information extraction, entity resolution and machine learning. The rating service combines verification of the individual or business identity, screening of their past behaviors and prediction of future behaviors. Rating parameters can be configured to meet different trust requirements based on company, industry and product dynamics.

Unlike legacy background, credit and risk checks, Trooly’s rating service requires minimal customer data input and costs less than $1 per query, with ratings and supporting evidence returned in roughly 30 seconds. Trooly’s predictive power has been demonstrated to be at least twice as effective as background checks, credit checks or database profiles in determining trustworthiness of individuals and businesses.

“Trooly’s innovative technology has enabled us to establish UrbanSitter as the most trusted service for sitters and parents, while scaling rapidly,” said Lynn Perkins, co-founder and CEO of UrbanSitter. “We use Trooly’s trust rating to verify and screen our caregivers. With 100,000 caregivers in 60 cities already on the platform, our alignment with Trooly will enable us to even further expand our network of trusted sitters.”

Trooly’s Instant Trust rating service is immediately available as a software-delivered service. Trooly supports both one-time queries and continuous monitoring, delivered through either simple REST APIs, a dedicated customer portal, or secure exchange of batch files.

Trooly operates as a consumer reporting agency, using only public and permissible information from online and offline sources. Trooly respects and complies with applicable privacy and data protection laws, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act in the United States. The company is also dedicated to balancing transparency with respect for individual privacy. The company allows consumers to check their own Trooly rating, review and correct individual profile data, or opt out of Trooly ratings altogether.

ABOUT TROOLY

Trooly delivers Instant Trust™ services that verify, screen and predict trustworthy relationships and interactions. Trooly works with the world’s largest financial institutions, peer-to-peer services, marketers and employers to fuel modern commerce and community. Trooly’s machine learning technology synthesizes digital footprints in real time to provide rich insight well beyond old-school background checks, credit scores and risk management tools.

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