We believe MetaMap is becoming an N-of-1 company in the user identity and reputation space by enabling businesses to work with billions of people in emerging markets that they previously couldn’t access or trust.
Emerging markets make up over 80% of the world population. However, businesses in these markets cannot always operate effectively today due to a lack of trust in the people they’re interacting with. Financial institutions want confidence in their mortgage borrowers; logistics companies want confidence in their drivers, and employers want confidence in prospective employees – these are a few examples of trust issues that MetaMap seeks to solve. Uncovering new high-value people in these markets can help a business grow, while bad actors can put a business in legal and reputational jeopardy.
Historically, traditional identity verification has lacked unified user data infrastructure and reliable decisioning tools. In many instances, verifying a person consists of a slow, manual process, cross-checking personally identifiable information fragmented across entities. Public competitors today tend to focus on a few and, in some cases, a single component of user identity data, often requiring businesses to hire multiple vendors to ensure sufficient coverage and depth. In addition, identity verifications in these markets can take weeks to return information that is potentially rife with omissions and inaccuracies.
MetaMap provides comprehensive profiles of user identity and reputation for businesses to trust people.
This is powered by a proprietary graph of “merits,” defined as individual pieces of personally identifiable information. This merit graph continues to grow and get smarter with every verification. These more granular atomic units enable MetaMap to increase their coverage of the global population, as well as the depth of knowledge about a person. Their product goes beyond answering the binary question “should I trust this person?” to the more nuanced “how much should I trust this person in a given context?” With MetaMap, businesses regardless of size or industry can access, understand, and work with the world population.
We believe the company is running the N-of-1 playbook as follows:
- Build a wedge by offering a service that is an order of magnitude better than the status quo to underserved customers.
- Harness this early growth to build a network that potentially wins over larger companies and dominates the market.
- Repeat by leveraging the network to build a new wedge in adjacent markets.
With MetaMap, businesses could have the potential to run more verifications and more confidently expand to user populations that were previously unknown at reasonable cost. In our opinion, MetaMap has built a wedge with its superior identity verification product.
Businesses are not only running more verifications over time, but they are also increasing the complexity of those verifications. Unlike traditional identity companies giving a boolean yes or no answer, MetaMap provides more valuable inferences and context behind users over time. This suggests that MetaMap continues to differentiate itself from competitors, causing businesses to be increasingly dependent on MetaMap to scale their businesses.
Through years of running verifications, MetaMap has generated a vast graph network of 300M merits. And this unique graph database is only growing faster over time. MetaMap’s merit graph has grown 12% every month with an implied 4x year-over-year growth. We believe that this merit graph will enable them to conquer the next phase of the N-of-1 playbook – winning over large enterprise companies and potentially dominating the market.
Tribe’s Weather Report found that emerging markets, particularly MetaMap’s core market Latin America, have struggled due to macroeconomic headwinds. However, MetaMap’s solution is so compelling that their core metrics have continued to grow despite overall macro trends of capital availability in the region.
Enterprises appreciate MetaMap’s rich dataset and resulting proprietary insights. For instance, MetaMap could share with a lender that a particular user requesting a mortgage has applied for quotes through the MetaMap platform offered through other lenders. This signal of user intent increases the lender’s confidence in a potential transaction with the user and allows them to prioritize this user over another user with fewer signals.
Further, MetaMap’s identity data coverage is so large that it now sees multiple verification requests for the same user profiles. This could reduce the cost of fulfillment and improve the user experience with fewer documents to re-upload, ultimately improving margins for the company.
Looking ahead, we believe that MetaMap is in a strong position to win the adjacent markets of reputation and user prediction.
MetaMap’s augmented profile aims to answer questions about user identity, risk, or reputation, by bridging the gap between the separate verticals in the public markets today.
If successful, this could create a virtuous cycle of intelligent user prediction and risk assessment. More merchants will request information from MetaMap about their users, in turn enriching MetaMap’s merits graph and proprietary insights, in turn increasing merchants’ trust in and dependence on MetaMap. Ultimately, we believe MetaMap can become a key source of truth to understand user behavior and risk in emerging markets.
We’re a venture capital firm focused on recognizing and amplifying early stage product-market fit. Reach us at hello@tribecap.co.
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