Digital behavioral intelligence startup ForMotiv raised $1M after big 2020 growth

Center City digital behavior intelligence company ForMotiv announced a round of fundraising this month, touting increased customer demand and intent to hire.

The five-year-old B2B startup’s artificial intelligence and machine learning platform promises to help companies in financial services and insurance spaces identify risky behavior. Its $1 million round came from existing investors and DreamIt Ventures, and will be used primarily to hire more employees to keep up with 2020’s quick growth. ForMotiv previously raised $650,000 in 2018.

“We weren’t exactly looking to raise money, but with the digital transformation accelerating due to COVID, the demand for new data sources, particularly behavioral data, has exploded,” said Bill Conners, president of ForMotiv, in a statement. “In 2021, we will analyze hundreds of millions of digital applications, which consist of anywhere from one to 55+ screens so the amount of data we’re collecting and analyzing at this point is significant.”

The tech platform works like this: Using information from customer’s digital behavior — which it calls “Digital Body Language” — while interacting with online forms (time to complete applications, repeated changes to responses and other red flags), ForMotiv identifies potentially risky client profiles and recommends additional steps to verify the information. The number of digital applications the company analyzed jumped from 100,000 to 100 million in 2020, it said.

The new funding will put the company in a position to hire more and serve its growing customer base, Conners said. Head of Product Mike Mayock also told Technical.ly in an email that toward the end of 2020, the company signed several large insurance carriers in the U.S., including Exton’s iPipeline.

“Covid has definitely served as the digital transformation accelerator for the financial services industry which is why digital body language and its value in risk identification and customer experience improvements has become such a hot topic,” Mayock said.

ForMotiv was in the news last spring for its efforts to feed healthcare workers and support the restaurant industry through the Fuel the Fight campaign. The org delivered more than 50,000 meals across Philadelphia, spending $450,000 at local restaurants.