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  • Type: Document-fraud detection and risk software for lenders, banks and fintech companies.
  • Founded: 2017, by Ronan Burke (chief executive) and Conor Burke (chief technology officer); headquartered in San Francisco with an office in Dublin.
  • Pandemic role: Document-fraud screening in BlueVine's PPP application process and, for uploaded bank and tax documents, inside Womply's Fast Lane platform; not a lender and not an eligibility decision-maker.
  • Current status: Venture-backed; raised a $25 million Series B in January 2023 led by Threshold Ventures.
  • Related article: Inscribe and the Document Fraud Layer

Pandemic-role map

  • Reader shorthand: the forged-document check on PPP uploads.
  • What Inscribe did for applicants: nothing directly; lenders and platforms ran applicants' uploaded bank statements and tax forms through its software.
  • What Inscribe sold to other companies: document forensics, a shared network of known fraudulent documents, and extraction and matching of names, addresses, dates and income.
  • Where responsibility sat: the lenders and platforms decided what to do with a flag; Inscribe returned signals.

Before the pandemic

Inscribe was founded in 2017 and went through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch; the Y Combinator page lists Ronan Burke as founder and chief executive and Conor Burke as founder and chief technology officer. Its April 2021 funding release describes three ways the product works. "Document forensics" examines a file's structure, pixels and metadata. A "data network" of known fraudulent documents is used to spot repeat fraudsters and rings. "Verification" extracts details such as income and matches them to what the institution has on file.

During the pandemic

BlueVine. The April 28, 2021 release quotes BlueVine's chief risk officer, Ido Lustig: "Inscribe has been an instrumental partner in identifying and preventing fraud across all of our products, including the PPP application process." Ronan Burke said in the same release that "2020 kicked off a perfect storm for fraud, with the pandemic-driven shift towards applications and approvals moving from in-person to online only." The company said its use had grown 12 times year over year and that it was detecting more than $40 million in fraudulent documents a month. It announced a $10.5 million Series A co-led by Uncork Capital, Foundry Group and Crosslink Capital.

Womply. Womply's developer order form with the lender Benworth Capital, effective April 14, 2021, lists Inscribe among the "Third-Party Providers" integrated into its PPP platform. The arbitrator in Womply's dispute with Benworth found that Womply's technology "analyzed and extracted data from documents using Inscribe, Mindee, and Ocrolus," and that Womply paid those providers. Womply's July 2024 amended complaint against Benworth says the platform "scanned bank and tax documents provided by applicants to identify potential fraud using third-party applications Ocrolus and Inscribe." The complaint notes that not every service applied to every application; that is Womply's pleading. Womply's May 2021 overview of its checks for the loan agent Blueacorn describes a "third tax document review" of flagged and sampled documents. That review, it says, runs "a variety of checks to detect if the document has been photoshopped or shows other evidence of tampering." The overview also says that without a way to confirm tax data with the IRS, "we are unable to distinguish between a well-executed fake document and a real one." It does not name the vendors.

The SBA's public PPP data list no loan to a San Francisco borrower named Inscribe; the borrowers with that word in their names are unrelated businesses in other states.

After the pandemic

On January 25, 2023 Inscribe announced a $25 million Series B led by Threshold Ventures, with Crosslink Capital, Foundry and Uncork Capital. TechCrunch reported that the round brought its total raised to $38 million and named TripActions, Ramp, Bluevine and Shift among its clients. In June 2024 the company introduced "AI Risk Agents," software it says performs routine onboarding and underwriting tasks for lenders. Its Y Combinator page, in our June 2026 copy, lists 35 employees and San Francisco as its location.

Source notes

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