Passbase
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
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Sections to complete：02 · 05
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Passbase was a privacy-first digital identity verification company founded in 2018 by Dave McGibbon, Mathias Klenk and co-founders, after their crypto wallet Coinance ran into regulatory hurdles. It offered developer APIs — dubbed 'Stripe for identity verification' — for selfie video scans and ID document checks, covering over 6,000 ID types across 190 countries for KYC, AML and age-verification use cases, with a patent-pending zero-knowledge architecture meant to limit data exposure.
02 / FAILURE REASONS
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03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Dave McGibbon, Mathias Klenk and co-founders launch Passbase in Berlin, pivoting from their crypto wallet Coinance to privacy-preserving identity verification.
- Seed funding
Passbase closes a $3.6 million seed round led by Cowboy Ventures and Eniac Ventures to build its API-first identity verification engine.
- Series A
Passbase raises $13.5 million — a $10 million Series A led by Costanoa Ventures plus an unannounced $3.5 million seed round — to scale and build a policy and workflow manager on top of its verification service.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN / AFTERMATH
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