Polish startup Certifier raised €260k for creating digital credentials infrastructure

Certifier.me is a polish-based startup that creates verifiable infrastructure for managing digital credentials, certificates, and diplomas.

The Certifier solution is designed to help universities, businesses, and institutions improve the efficiency of the credentialing process without the need for printed versions of documents.

The startup has experienced founders: Vlad Turak, previously working for Swedish startup Startdeliver, and serial entrepreneur listed on Forbes “30 under 30” and former co-founder CallPage – Sergey Butko. Black Pearls VC led the pre-seed round. Among the group of investors was also consultancy company Casbeg.

Currently, the Certifier solution is used by more than 50 universities, companies, and organizations. The project is at an early stage of development, but among its customers have, it has the most trusted organizations in the world like the University of Melbourne, Salesforce, Australian Pacific College, Sofia University, and ASEAN University Network.

Our mission is to create a trusted infrastructure that will become the standard for digital certificate issuance, storage, and verification.

Currently in the marketplace, a “digital certificate” means a scanned paper document. Students get just such a “PDF certificate” after graduating from college, sometimes worth $100-150K.
The situation is absurd and we want to change it.

Vladyslav Turak, co-founder of Certifier

The raised funds will be invested in building API and SDK of the solution, and thanks to joining investors alongside the capital, the company receives know-how in the area of digital documents and scaling sales proses.

The move to digital documents and electronic signatures is growing in popularity across organizations. As an investor in our portfolio, we have a company like Autenti that offers e-signature services.

We see that certificate providers will be able to develop further areas of digitalization of document workflows and we strongly believe in the market in which Certifier operates.

Wojciech Drewczyński, Head of Acceleration at Black Pearls VC

Certifier is not the first entity that has taken up the issue of transitioning to digital certificates. Already for several years, a consortium of the world’s leading universities has been fighting the problem at the level of academia and scientific papers, and the European Commission is working on the Europass Digital Credentials Infrastructure (EDCI) initiative.

The target market is forecast to experience an average annual growth rate of 22.5% between 2021 and 2026, and Certifier’s founders expect to nail the upcoming market transformation.

We believe in Certifier team, I met Sergey back in 2016 and I am impressed by his abilities. The project is at an early stage of development, but it has already won its first customers on the global market which proves its good adaptation to the market needs. I couldn’t have imagined our first investment better.

Bartek Majewski, CEO of Casbeg