CPE News Brief (8.11.2022) – Qui Identity Inc. has raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by Round13 Digital Asset Fund, with participation from Wittington Ventures, OMERS Ventures and private investors from United States and Canada.
Founded by Kirk Simpson, co-founder and past CEO of Wave, and Peter Carrescia, formerly SVP Strategy at Wave, Toronto based Qui Identity Inc. is reinventing how trusted interactions take place for each of us, every day. Based on decentralized identity standards, Qui is building the infrastructure that will allow individuals and companies to instantly exchange permissioned, verified identity information.
Qui will use funds to expand its global team – including technologists with expertise in decentralized identity, web3 and mobile.
photo credit: Qui
News Release
Qui Identity Inc. launches to accelerate the adoption of decentralized identity
August 4, 2022
Company secures $6.5 million in seed funding
Kirk Simpson, co-founder and past CEO of Wave Financial Inc., and Peter Carrescia, a veteran of the technology landscape and previously SVP Strategy at Wave, today announced the launch of Qui Identity Inc., a technology venture that will provide decentralized identity technologies and services to individuals and companies.
Qui has raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by Round 13 Digital Asset Fund, with participation from Wittington Ventures, OMERS Ventures and prominent angel investors in the United States and Canada. The funds will be used to aggressively expand its global team – including technologists with expertise in decentralized identity, web3 and mobile.
Qui (French for ‘who’ and pronounced ‘key’) is reinventing how trusted interactions take place for each of us, every day. In today’s world, you make claims about your identity all the time, both in the digital and physical world, to secure access to products and services. Your identity extends beyond traditional attributes like your name, your address, your image and your education, to include memberships you hold and things you own, both physical and digital (e.g. NFTs, property, and other assets). Increasingly, people are exposing more personal data than they need to, and companies are spending more, and accepting more friction, to confirm this data.
With user-controlled, easy-to-use digital identity solutions for individuals, and robust APIs and SDKs for companies, Qui will accelerate the adoption of decentralized identity. With Qui, people will be in complete control of what they share at a granular level. Qui will make commercial activities flow more easily, with greater trust for businesses and greater security for individuals.
Simpson co-founded Wave in 2010, and led the company as CEO until June 2022. Under his leadership, the company grew to revenues of $100 million and a team of 350. Wave was acquired by H&R Block in 2019 for $537 million, making it at the time one of the ten largest tech acquisitions in Canadian startup history.
“There’s been a lot of great progress on standards and protocols around decentralized identity,” says Simpson. “With Qui, we’ll move toward mass adoption, providing individuals with control and privacy, while ensuring a high level of security and trust is maintained. Know-Your-Customer (KYC) onboarding processes for financial service products is an obvious example, but there are many others. User-controlled decentralized identity is the basis of the important next step forward in how people manage, share, and control their identity.”
Carrescia has been involved in high-growth companies as both an operator and investor. Peter first met Kirk in January 2011, when as founding managing director at OMERS Ventures he led the initial seed investment in Wave. After serving as President of NEXT Canada, a national technology accelerator focused on high potential founders, Carrescia joined back with Simpson as Wave’s SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development, where he was instrumental in the company’s acquisition by H&R Block.
“The benefits of decentralized identity are clear and its adoption is inevitable,” says Carrescia. “Implementing some of the recent advancements in the space, Qui will provide technologies and user experiences that scale elegantly across countless use cases.”
Satraj Bambra, managing partner at Round 13 Digital Asset Fund says, “At Round 13, we believe strongly that decentralization provides compelling advantages over traditional centralized web approaches and no more so than in the area of identity. We are excited to partner with successful entrepreneurs like Kirk and Peter as they deliver on their vision.”
Headquartered in Toronto, Qui is using this funding to aggressively expand its global team – including technologists with expertise in decentralized identity, web3 and mobile.
About Qui Identity Inc.
Qui (French for ‘who’ and pronounced ‘key’) is reinventing how trusted interactions take place for each of us, every day. Based on decentralized identity standards, Qui is building the infrastructure that will allow individuals and companies to instantly exchange permissioned, verified identity information. The result: secure, trusted and frictionless access to products and services, with complete control for the individual. For more information, visit us at www.qui.xyz. Follow us on Twitter at @qui_identity or at linkedIn.com/company/qui-identity