Meet Mati, a startup that recently raised a $13.5 million Series A round to build a digital reputation API that could change the way you interact with online services. Mati uses an API-first approach and lets users seamlessly share pieces of their legal identity.
Investors in today’s funding round include Tribe Capital, with Arjun Sethi joining the board; Jerry Murdock from Insight Partners; Sima Gandhi, who is the former head of business development and strategy at Plaid; and Will Hockey, the CTO of Plaid.
Mati isn’t just an ID verification company with biometric checks. In many ways, Mati works a bit like Plaid, but not just for other types of data. When a company starts using Mati, they can verify various data points, such as residency, income and taxes.
Instead of taking a photograph of important documents, Mati can help you connect to a government database or a utility provider to download and share data from those services directly.
“What we do is a digital reputation API that turns anonymous strangers into trustworthy users,” co-founder and CEO Filip Victor told me. And these kinds of verifications are extremely important for fintech startups and companies operating in the so-called sharing economy industry.
Filip Victor himself has suffered in the past from poor reputation processes. As an immigrant in the U.S., he couldn’t verify himself on Airbnb. The issue is that most reputation services aren’t that flexible. You run into edge cases quite quickly when you’re an immigrant or you don’t have the right documents.
Mati has chosen to focus on high-growth regions, such as Latin America and South East Asia, because they tend to be underserved when it comes to digital reputation. Clients include Te Creemos, Taptap Send and Tropipay.
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“We went region by region, country by country and scraped into different databases. We gained access to things like social security access via the user,” Victor said.
Mati is thinking about other use cases beyond financial services and sharing-economy startups. Many online services could benefit from some level of trust. By letting users choose what they want and don’t want to share, the company believes it has found the right balance between privacy and trust.
“Privacy is not about being anonymous or hidden. It’s about controlling your data,” Victor said.
For now, the company has managed to attract 200 customers. In the past year, Mati has tripled the number of customers. The startup now has 50 employees and plans to add another 20 employees with the Series A round.
Romain Dillet was a Senior Reporter at TechCrunch until April 2025. He has written over 3,500 articles on technology and tech startups and has established himself as an influential voice on the European tech scene. He has a deep background in startups, AI, fintech, privacy, security, blockchain, mobile, social and media. With thirteen years of experience at TechCrunch, he’s one of the familiar faces of the tech publication that obsessively covers Silicon Valley and the tech industry — his career started at TechCrunch when he was 21. Based in Paris, many people in the tech ecosystem consider him as the most knowledgeable tech journalist in town. Romain likes to spot important startups before anyone else. He was the first person to cover Revolut, Alan and N26. He has written scoops on large acquisitions from Apple, Microsoft and Snap. When he’s not writing, Romain is also a developer — he understands how the tech behind the tech works. He also has a deep historical knowledge of the computer industry for the past 50 years. He knows how to connect the dots between innovations and the effect on the fabric of our society. Romain graduated from Emlyon Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He has helped several non-profit organizations, such as StartHer, an organization that promotes education and empowerment of women in technology, and Techfugees, an organization that empowers displaced people with technology.