Company: Securely Group

Founders: Rob Neely

Headquarters: Noosa Heads, Queensland, Australia

Most Recent Valuation: $169m USD, 2026

Employees: 9

Founded: 2020

In One Sentence: “Securely provides innovative fintech, paytech and zero trust solutions built on advanced identitech.”

Top quote: “Rather than trying to persuade people purely through argument, we focused on building defensible patents, demonstrating working technology, and engaging directly with the institutions that operate the payment rails.”

Who are you building your product/service for, and what painful problem are you taking away from their day?

Scams and fraud originating from social media platforms now account for more than $1 trillion globally each year, making it one of the fastest-growing forms of organised crime in the world.

The underlying problem is simple: most digital platforms still allow people to interact using profiles that are not tied to a verified identity. We are building Securely for banks, payment service providers, governments, and major digital platforms that are grappling with this breakdown in trust.

Our technology removes that pain by linking digital accounts and transactions back to a real, KYC-verified identity that already exists within the banking system. In practical terms, it means that when people transact, communicate, or meet online, there is a trusted identity behind the profile, dramatically reducing the ability for scammers and impersonators to operate.

If a top-tier VC is reading this, what would you want them to understand about your company in 30 seconds?

If a top-tier VC is looking at Securely, the key thing to understand is the scale of the market we are addressing. The problem we are solving sits at the intersection of digital identity, social platforms, and payments—markets that collectively operate at enormous global volume.

To put that in perspective, the addressable transaction layer we are targeting is comparable in scale to the market that companies like PayPal operate in, which processes on the order of 20 billion transactions a year. When infrastructure sits underneath flows of that size, even very small transaction fees translate into extremely large businesses.

That is why this opportunity is fundamentally infrastructure-scale fintech. If the architecture works—and our patents and institutional partnerships suggest it can—you are looking at a platform capable of operating at global transaction volumes. At that level, the economics and network effects are what typically produce unicorn outcomes and beyond

What has nobody else done what you’re doing?

Most companies have tried to solve the problem from the platform side—using blue ticks, emails, phone numbers, or AI moderation. Those help a little, but they don’t solve the core issue because the identity behind the profile is still not tied to a trusted source.

We approached it differently by starting from the identity infrastructure layer. The strongest identity system that already exists globally is the banking system, where every customer is verified through KYC.

Securely’s patented architecture bridges those two worlds, allowing a digital profile—on a marketplace, social platform, or dating app—to be securely linked to an existing bank-verified identity without exposing financial information. That creates a level of accountability online that platforms alone have never been able to achieve.

How did you meet, and why have you partnered with each other on this business?

I deliberately hand-picked my co-founders rather than starting with a group that happened to come together organically. The problem we were trying to solve sits at the intersection of several very different disciplines—payments infrastructure, digital identity, banking systems, and large-scale application development—so it was important to assemble a team with complementary expertise.

Each co-founder brings deep experience from a different part of that ecosystem. Some come from the application and platform development side, others from banking and payments infrastructure, and others from identity and security architecture. That mix allowed us to approach the challenge not just as a software problem, but as something that had to work within regulated financial systems and real-world payment rails.

The partnership works because we all bring very different skill sets to the table, but we share the same belief that the internet needs a stronger trust layer. By combining those different areas of expertise, we’ve been able to build technology that bridges social platforms, identity systems, and banking infrastructure in a way that none of us could have done individually

What was the “this has to exist” moment that made you start the company?

The origin of Securely was actually quite accidental. In 2020 we were working on a different concept aimed at solving disputes between builders and homeowners—an industry where builders often complain about not being paid and homeowners complain about unfinished work. The goal was simply to bring transparency and accountability to those transactions.

As people began using the early version of the app in 2021, many started using it for something we hadn’t anticipated: buying and selling items on Facebook Marketplace. It quickly became clear that the same trust problem existed there. Buyers and sellers were interacting through unverified profiles, payments were happening outside the platform, and disputes and scams were common.

That led us to build a second application focused on safer peer-to-peer payments. Around that time we were approached by Australian Payments Plus, which operates Australia’s core payment rails. Through those discussions we gained deeper insight into how payment orchestration actually works.

While trying to solve the trust and non-payment issues we were seeing in social marketplaces, the real insight emerged: the missing layer was identity. From there the concept evolved beyond a payment app into a broader infrastructure—linking digital profiles and transactions back to trusted, verified identities through the banking system. That architecture became the foundation of Securely and the patent portfolio we are building today.

How do you make money? Which part of your business model are you most excited about scaling?

Securely generates revenue by licensing its identity-linked payment and verification infrastructure to banks, payment service providers, and digital platforms. The core model is transaction-based: when a platform uses our technology to verify identities or process a payment tied to that verified identity, Securely earns a small fee per transaction. We also license our infrastructure and patents at a territory or institutional level to financial institutions and platforms that want to deploy the technology across their ecosystems.

The part of the model I’m most excited about scaling is the network effect of identity-anchored transactions. Once a bank or platform integrates the infrastructure, every verified interaction—whether it’s a marketplace payment, social media transaction, or identity certification—can flow across the same rail. As transaction volumes grow globally, the model scales very efficiently because the infrastructure sits underneath many different platforms rather than being tied to a single app.

Which proof points matter most right now?

Right now the most important proof points are strategic partnerships and institutional validation. Because Securely operates at the infrastructure layer of payments and identity, adoption by banks, payment service providers, and large digital platforms matters far more than simply counting users on a single app.

Our focus is on territory-by-territory deployment, working with regulated financial institutions to license and implement the infrastructure locally. Each territory that adopts the system effectively becomes another node in the network. Over time, those deployments connect together to form what we are building toward: Securely Pay, a global identity-anchored payment and verification rail that will sit alongside platforms such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Stripe within the global payments ecosystem.

What excites us is that once a territory is established, the infrastructure can support multiple platforms and millions of transactions on the same rail, creating powerful network effects as adoption expands internationally.

How does your product/service make the world a better place?

Scams that originate through social media now cost the global economy more than $1 trillion every year, but the real damage goes far beyond the money. Victims often suffer profound emotional harm, family breakdown, loss of retirement savings, and in some cases severe mental health consequences. Entire communities are affected as trust in digital platforms, marketplaces, and even in other people begins to erode.

At its core, this problem exists because most digital interactions still begin with unverified identities. People are trading, forming relationships, and sending money to profiles that may not represent a real person. Securely addresses this structural weakness by enabling digital accounts to be linked back to a verified identity that already exists within the regulated financial system. By anchoring online activity to trusted identity, scammers, impersonators, and organised fraud networks lose the anonymity that allows them to operate at scale.

Beyond financial scams, the same identity architecture also has implications for personal safety and online relationships. Our second patent focuses specifically on identity verification within dating platforms, where issues such as catfishing, romance scams, and sexual predation have become widespread. By ensuring that users can only participate through verified identities, the technology significantly reduces the ability for bad actors to create fake personas or repeatedly reappear under new profiles.

In simple terms, the mission is to restore trust to the digital world. If people know that the person on the other side of a transaction, message, or relationship is a real, verified individual, the internet becomes safer not just financially, but socially. It strengthens communities, protects vulnerable users, and helps ensure that digital platforms operate with the same level of accountability that exists in the physical world.

What’s been your biggest unexpected challenge so far, and what did it force you to learn quickly?

The biggest unexpected challenge has been convincing parts of the traditional financial and regulatory ecosystem that a significant piece of infrastructure innovation could come from outside the banking industry. Banking is understandably conservative, but it also means many institutions have historically assumed that if a solution to identity and payment trust existed, it would have already come from within their own systems.

In the early days, that meant overcoming a degree of skepticism from both bankers and government departments, many of whom have very strong institutional views about how identity and payment systems should evolve. The idea that someone from outside the sector had developed an orchestration layer linking digital identities to regulated financial infrastructure was not immediately intuitive to them.

What it forced us to learn very quickly was patience, persistence, and the importance of intellectual property. Rather than trying to persuade people purely through argument, we focused on building defensible patents, demonstrating working technology, and engaging directly with the institutions that operate the payment rails.

Interestingly, the global policy environment is now beginning to move in the same direction. Governments around the world are introducing measures around verified identity on social media and age assurance for under-16 users, which touches directly on the same identity architecture that our patents describe. What was once seen as a novel idea is increasingly being recognised as part of the broader solution to digital trust, fraud, and online safety

What does success look like in 12 months? What about in 5 years?

12 months:

Success in the next year is about execution and deployment. We are already in discussions across multiple regions including Asia, India, North and South America, Africa, and Europe, so the key milestone is converting those discussions into licensed territory implementations with banks, payment providers, and digital platforms. Over the next 12 months we want to see Securely’s infrastructure operating in several jurisdictions, demonstrating that the identity-anchored payment model works at scale in real markets.

5 years:

Five years from now, success is Securely Pay becoming an internationally recognised third-party payment service provider, sitting alongside established global payment platforms such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Stripe. By that stage the goal is to have widespread adoption of the infrastructure across multiple territories, with identity-anchored transactions flowing through the network at global scale.

We already know that the intellectual property we have built carries significant intrinsic value—around $3 billion in defensible technology and patents. The real task now is execution: translating that IP into global deployments that rebuild trust across payments, social platforms, and digital identity systems.

What type of partner or collaborator would most accelerate your journey right now? (If relevant, which roles are you hiring for?)

The partner who can most accelerate our journey now is a deeply embedded strategic institution operating within the financial and regulatory ecosystem of the markets where our rails are gaining traction, rather than another purely financial investor.

We have recently completed our Series B funding round with a pre-money valuation of $125 million and a $44 million raise. Importantly, the most valuable element of that round was not simply the capital, but the strategic asset the incoming investor brings to the table—access, credibility, and distribution within regulated financial systems.

At this stage of the company’s growth, the real acceleration comes from partners who can bridge technology into regulated markets. That means institutions such as major banks, payments infrastructure operators, or regulator-adjacent bodies that see Securely as part of future national or cross-border digital infrastructure, particularly in areas like fraud prevention, digital identity verification, and trusted payments.

Equally important are distribution-minded partners in sectors such as marketplaces, MSME finance, insurance, or large digital platforms who are prepared to deploy real use cases at scale. These collaborations allow the infrastructure to move quickly from concept into live environments where identity-anchored payments and verification can operate at volume.

In short, the next phase of growth is less about raising additional capital and more about strategic partnerships that help embed Securely into the international payments and digital identity ecosystem.

Finish this sentence: “We’ll know we’ve really made it when…”

… people stop thinking about trust online because it’s simply built into the infrastructure—when verifying who you are before you transact, communicate, or meet someone digitally is as normal as tapping your phone to pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay, and Securely Pay is quietly operating underneath billions of those trusted interactions around the world.”

Website: https://www.securely.group/

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