NoVa startup Trua wants to change digital identity

Mother’s maiden name, first car, street you grew up on, father’s middle name — it’s not hard to know what all those things have in common.

As serial entrepreneur Raj Ananthanpillai moved through his own life and saw reports of data breaches galore, he felt like a key problem was not being addressed.

“Everybody’s trying to put band-aids on the existing system and then the businesses are scrambling because breaches are through the roof. People are getting breach fatigue, and the losses are increasing,” Ananthanpillai told Technical.ly. “All of those kinds of stuff is just too much and people are not looking at it fundamentally to solve the root cause. ”

That root cause, he thinks, is that people need to give out personal information over and over again, increasing opportunities for it to be stolen. So, after this thought brewed in his brain for a while, he set out to create a solution.

A few years later, that pursuit turned into McLean, Virginia-based Trua, which launches from stealth today as it emerges from parent company Endera, also founded by Ananthanpillai. Trua is a verified identity product for consumers that hopes to reduce the amount that people need to share private info online.

Everywhere people go online, Ananthanpillai said, it seems users have to give some form of identification. That means addresses, social security numbers, security question answers like a mother’s maiden name and, in some cases, uploading a copy of government-issued identification like a driver’s license. With Trua’s TruaID, users can verify their identity once, add the TruaID to their digital wallet and reuse it across the internet. In other words, he said, it’s a background check that never expires.

“You get it once, put it in your digital wallet and you can reuse it,” Ananthanpillai said. “Then, if I have to verify that TruaID, I don’t need to ask you for your personal information.”

For those with higher identity verification needs, like employers, Trua also created a TruaScore, which takes criminal and civil records, education and other info into account. TruaScore then gives the person a score from zero to 360, and also gives the person in question a chance to make sure the information is correct and that they’re not being mistaken for someone else.

Trua has been working on its products since March of last year and legally separated from Endera in January 2023. Ananthanpillai will remain CEO of the 12-person startup as well as Endera and self-funded both companies.

Trua, Ananthanpillai said, is blockchain-based, so user information is codified and put into a blockchain ledger and only macro-information is passed around during the verification process. It also embedded facial comparison technology, multifactor authentication and data encryption.

Following the launch, Ananthanpillai hopes to raise anywhere from $10 to $15 million later this year. It’s part of a general growth plan for Trua, which includes hiring a “growth executive” to expand the startup.

“Ultimately, my goal is if I can take our social security numbers out of the ether, even a portion of them, then there will be a lot less breaches and worry about somebody misusing their social or date of birth,” Ananthanpillai said.