Prove Purchases Portabl to Advance Identity Authentication

Prove bought a startup led by a Wharton School MBA recipient to enhance its offerings around identity verification and data consent management.

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The New York-based digital identity company said its acquisition of Philadelphia-based Portabl will help Prove address emerging needs in identity authentication and simplify identity verification – while keeping robust security. Prove’s expertise in consent-based data integration and Portabl’s focus on identity interoperability is aimed at helping address the convergence between identity, authentication and payments.

“It made total sense to combine forces given Prove’s extensive network both in and outside of the financial services sector, our focus on the relationship between identity and financial access and payments,” Portabl co-founder and CEO Nate Soffio told Information Security Media Group. “It made perfect sense for us.”

How Portabl Addresses Identity Verification Challenges

Portabl, founded in 2021, employs five people and raised $2.5 million in a September 2022 seed round led by Harlem Capital Partners. The company has been led since inception by Soffio, who spent three years at due diligence vendor Arachnys and received a master of business administration from Penn’s Wharton School of Business (see: Entrust, Jumio, Sumsub Lead Identity Verification Gartner MQ).

“Nate is a master of this space,” Daniel Killmer said. “He really brought me up to speed more so than anybody else I met or talked to. His network continues to be coming out of the woodwork after this acquisition announcement … just showing their appreciation for just how much experience and knowledge and learnings that he brings to the table. That gave me the confidence that I wanted him.”

Prove and Portabl both identified a growing need to address the challenges of identity verification, particularly in the context of regulatory requirements and seamless user experiences. Prove has been handling data integration and consent for its clients, and buying Portabl will allow the firm to go from customizing processes for each case to scaling these efforts using Portabl’s reusable identity expertise.

“They were in our circle of people that we talked to, and were really having some significant interest in in the broader community, in the banking and the payments industry,” said Killmer, Prove’s head of identity solutions.

Portable’s reusable identity platform stood out for its ability to support both user-friendly verification processes and robust fraud prevention mechanisms by focusing on identity interoperability and making verified identities portable across networks. Killmer said Portabl positions itself as a network-driven identity company focused on allowing verified users to navigate securely across multiple platforms.

“The other part of our stack is around fraud alerting and making it easier to spot bad guys proactively,” Soffio said. “We always thought of ourselves as an identity interoperability or network company first, and we still happen to have different libraries and components and primitives that allow you to verify identity in different ways at different assurance levels.”

How Prove, Portabl Will Come Together

Rather than directly integrating Portabl’s existing code, Prove plans to leverage the insights gained by Portabl to enhance its own platform, with a focus on making the user consent process seamless and expanding the breadth of data sources available to customers. A key goal is to develop standardized mechanisms for obtaining user consent, which will ensure compliance with future regulatory standards.

“We’re at the point where we’re understanding whose Legos can go where, and it’s actually a lot of fun,” Soffio said. “We’re really thinking about it in terms of setting timelines for certain kinds of functionality, and focusing on how best we can add features to the product portfolio. There’s all these real problems we haven’t addressed yet.”

The acquisition will give Portabl the resources and scale of a larger organization, providing the team with access to Prove’s extensive network in banking and payments, according to Killmer. Portabl’s mission is amplified by Prove’s infrastructure and ability to bring solutions to market at scale, while Prove will benefit from Portabl’s innovative approach and niche expertise to solve identity challenges.

“It’s really exciting to have the resources and wind in the sails behind our original mission of normalizing some of these tech standards and solving your customer’s problem,” Soffio said.

Killmer said he envisions a future in which AI agents leverage Prove’s consent management systems to perform tasks on behalf of users such as booking services or finding products. The company plans to offer varying levels of identity assurance tailored to use cases from high-security banking applications to low-security social media interactions via verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers, he said.

“Being able to offer the right assurance level for a customer’s use case is a big part of what we’re doing,” Killmer said. “It’s very hard to get to that top level of assurance, and that’s where we’re starting from. But we can actually drop our assurance levels down for the right use cases, for the right authorization policies to really be the identity layer of the internet.”