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Socure

Vendor or contractor

Unemployment insurance
Type
Company or group
Role
Vendor or contractor
Programs
Unemployment insurance
Updated

The profile

Socure sells the check that decides whether an online applicant is who they claim to be. It opened a public-sector business in October 2021, citing the flood of fraudulent unemployment claims during the pandemic, and by March 2025 said more than 34 state agencies and three federal agencies used it. SBA's loan-level PPP data list no loan under the Socure name.

  • Type: Digital identity verification and fraud-scoring company.
  • Founded: 2012, in New York, by Johnny Ayers and Sunil Madhu.
  • Current status: Private; based in Incline Village, Nevada.
  • Last updated: 2026-09-25

Founders, executives and investors

Ayers and Madhu founded Socure in New York in 2012, according to Contrary Research. Madhu was the first chief executive; Tom Thimot, who joined in early 2018, ran the company until November 17, 2020, when Socure named Ayers, then its chief product officer, as chief executive.

Socure raised $100 million in a Series D in March 2021 at a $1.3 billion valuation. In November 2021 it raised $450 million in a Series E led by Accel and T. Rowe Price, at a $4.5 billion valuation, TechCrunch reported. Bain Capital Ventures and Tiger Global joined as new investors, with Commerce Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Sorenson Ventures following on. That brought its total funding since 2012 to $646 million.

Business before the pandemic

Socure's models score an applicant from email, phone, address, IP, device and other data, the company says, and return an identity decision in real time. The company says its identity resolution engine draws on more than 8 billion records, including credit histories, utility information and educational records. When Ayers became chief executive in November 2020, Socure said it had more than 350 customers, among them four of the five largest U.S. banks and eight of the ten largest credit card issuers. Contrary Research put its revenue in the double-digit millions by 2019.

Pandemic-relief role

Socure's customer count went from about 350 in March 2021 to nearly 1,000 that November, TechCrunch reported, as more business moved online. In October 2021 the company launched a public-sector business under Matt Thompson, who came from IDEMIA and, according to Socure, co-founded ID.me. Socure's announcement pointed to the explosion of fraudulent unemployment claims. "Many agencies lack the industry experience required to effectively manage identity verification and reduce fraud losses in the midst of accelerated digital transformation due to the pandemic," Thompson said. TechCrunch listed unemployment fraud prevention as one of Socure's use cases.

None of these sources names a state unemployment agency that used Socure in 2020 or 2021.

Controversies

In August 2024 Biometric Update reported that New York State Senator Jeremy Cooney, chair of the Senate procurement committee, had written to the state's chief information officer calling Socure a "data broker" and asking how it was vetted before winning a state identity-verification contract. His letter cited an earlier letter to Ayers from Ritchie Torres about discrimination concerns, and a lawsuit in which a former commercial customer claimed Socure had cut its annual fraud losses by 31 percent against an advertised 95 percent. The figures are the customer's claim.

Since 2025

Socure agreed in October 2024 to buy Effectiv, a fraud and risk decisioning company, for $136 million. In February 2025 it said it had verified more than 2.7 billion identity requests in 2024, covering 370 million unique identities, and that its customer base had grown 42 percent to more than 2,800 organizations.

On March 27, 2025 its government platform, SocureGov, received a Moderate authorization under FedRAMP, the federal cloud security program; the release named the State of California and the State of Florida among its customers. A Socure report in May 2025 described fraud networks in China, Russia and other countries targeting U.S. government programs, and said that during the pandemic agencies "were flooded with fraudulent applications that went undetected by outdated methods and legacy providers." On April 28, 2026 the company headlined its first-quarter results "$340M+ Total ARR with 62% YoY Profitable Growth."

Sources

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