Jumio, which provides identity-verification services to travel companies and other vendors, has filed for bankruptcy protection.
The Palo Alto-based mobile credentials technology business will continue to operate as normal.
By late April, the company intends to sell its assets. Under the plan, there would be an auction for the assets, with a floor starting at $22.66 million.
Early investor Eduardo Saverin, who holds a 16% stake in the company and was also famously a co-founder of Facebook, plans to make the initial bid, with competitive bids thereafter.
Prior to these maneuverings, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which in 2012 led a $25.5 million Series B round of investment in the startup, transferred its convertible notes to Saverin.
Founded in 2010, Jumio needed to restate its 2013 and 2014 financial statements due to errors in how it had counted income as revenue. It is also cooperating with a government investigation related to some securities its previous management sold to investors.
In its petition to the court, the company said its liabilities were between $10 and $50 million.
While not aiming only at travel for clients, Jumio has attracted many travel brands, such as Airbnb, Bravofly, and EasyJet, with its ID-verification services.
For instance, both United Airlines and EasyJet have integrated the startup's technology to verify their passengers through the scanning of identity documents within their respective mobile apps.
When passengers scan their ID documents, Jumio extracts data, including name, date of birth, gender, nationality and passport number, and passes it to the carrier’s systems.
The technology ensures compliance with US government Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) requirements, enabling an airline to issue a mobile boarding pass so that the passenger can skip the queues at check-in.
One of Jumio's other innovations is so-called Fastfill technology, which a supplier can install within a mobile app and enable a traveler or other customer to scan his or her own IDs to extract and automatically populate personal data fields on webpages, such as a check-out page for booking an airplane ticket.
