Identity Authentication in the Digital Economy: Our Investment in Socure

By Andy Collins and Matt Hamilton, Managing Directors, Summit Partners

A common assumption in identity and fraud prevention has long been that security and growth sit in tension — that preventing bad actors means creating friction for good customers. We believe that tradeoff is a false one, and that getting identity right can be both a powerful growth lever and a critical risk control. Across the digital economy, enterprises that can confidently authenticate a legitimate customer in milliseconds can, in our view, gain a meaningful competitive advantage over those that cannot. Socure is focused on building that capability at scale, and today Summit Partners is proud to announce our investment in the company.

In our view, the threat environment is growing more complex. We believe advances in generative AI have made it easier to create synthetic identities, deepfakes and automated fraud campaigns, and many legacy identity systems increasingly struggle to reliably distinguish a legitimate customer from a fraudulent one in real time. But we believe the opportunity extends beyond playing defense: enterprises across financial services, government, gaming, healthcare, telecom and e-commerce may be leaving revenue on the table when their identity infrastructure cannot authenticate “good” customers with accuracy and at scale. That is the opportunity Socure seeks to address.

Socure began as an identity verification point solution. Over time, in an effort to respond to the market’s need, the company has evolved into a fully vertically integrated platform spanning dozens of products across identity verification, fraud prevention, compliance and risk decisioning. The company’s foundation is its identity graph, a persistent, compounding intelligence layer built over more than a decade through a contributory data consortium in which each customer adds signal that can improve decisions across the entire network. Socure’s Local Graph gives each enterprise an institution-specific view of its own customers, while the company’s Global Graph draws on signals across Socure's network of more than 3,000 customers and is designed to allow a fraud pattern detected at one institution to improve decisions across the ecosystem. That is a network effect that, in our view, is difficult to replicate quickly, and one we believe strengthens as customers join the network. RiskOS, Socure's AI-native decisioning platform, is purpose-built to put that intelligence to work across the full product suite in a single layer designed to adapt in real time. As AI agents increasingly act on behalf of humans across digital workflows, we believe verifying the identity of the agent itself — not just the human it represents — is an emerging frontier, and one we believe Socure's network and platform are well positioned to address.

Cybersecurity and digital economy infrastructure have long been focus areas for Summit Partners. We believe the identity layer of the digital economy — determining, in real time, whether the person or agent on the other side of an interaction is who they claim to be — is in the early stages of consolidating, increasingly favoring platforms with differentiated data, modern technology architectures and the ability to operate at scale as AI-driven threats continue to evolve. In our view, Socure is well positioned to capitalize on these trends, and we are proud to partner with Johnny Ayers and the Socure team in their pursuit of that opportunity.

Read more: Socure Announces Strategic Growth Investment at $5.2B Valuation and Acquires Agentic Operations Platform Fravity

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The content herein reflects the views and opinions of Summit Partners and is intended for executives and operators considering partnering with Summit Partners. The content herein is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a solicitation, or an offer to buy or sell any security or investment product. The information herein has not been independently verified by Summit Partners or an independent party.

AI technology is evolving rapidly, and the full scope of its impact — including associated opportunities, risks, and regulatory implications — remains uncertain. Material risks inherent to AI initiatives include dependence on data quality and completeness, variability in model outputs, evolving compliance obligations and the execution challenges of implementing AI on legacy systems or poorly structured data. AI tools cannot substitute for sound data governance, and organizations should not assume AI will resolve underlying data quality issues.

Any reference to "expertise," "expert," or similar descriptions of knowledge or proficiency reflect the subjective assessment of Summit Partners and is intended solely to indicate familiarity with a subject area. Such characterizations should not be construed or relied upon as an indication of future performance or other future outcomes.

Information herein is as of August 27, 2026

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