Of the three companies participating in the inaugural Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator, two are Finovate alums. One is EyeVerify, which also reported a $6 million dollar investment on Wednesday. The other is Zumigo.
What was it about Zumigo in particular that caught Wells Fargo’s eye? According to Zumigo, the big bank is especially interested in the company’s mobile location intelligence technology, which provides authentication services for mobile transactions. Zumigo’s solution allows financial institutions to be more proactive than is “current industry practice,” according to Chirag Bakshi, founder and CEO of Zumigo.
“Zumigo’s innovative technology for financial services institutions such as Wells Fargo can detect fraudulent transactions before (they) impact their customers,” Chirag added.
In the words of Steve Ellis, executive vice president and head of Wholesale Services at Wells Fargo, the goal of the Accelerator is to increase the bank’s “visibility into technologies and ideas that will stoke innovation across the enterprise.” And considering that two out of the three companies participating are security/authentication-related, Wells Fargo may be telling us a lot more about the kind of innovation major banks are looking for than it may seem. The third company, Kasisto, is a New York startup that specializes in conversational artificial intelligence technology.
Participating in the Accelerator includes an equity investment of between $50,000 and $500,000. Zumigo did not immediately disclose the level of investment it received. The program lasts for six months, and will provide business planning expertise geared toward developing “innovative ideas and stoke innovation across the Wells Fargo enterprise.”
Zumigo was founded in 2009, and demoed its Assure solution at FinovateSpring 2014. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California.