Garlik

When you’re a start-up with the creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, on your advisory board, you’re onto something. But you’d expect nothing less of chief executive Tom Ilube and his executive chairman Mike Harris.

The pair took online bank Egg public with a market capitalisation of £1.3bn. Before that Harris had created the world’s first telephone banking operation, First Direct.

Whether Garlik scales such heights remains to be seen, but the new venture’s focus – online identity – is volcanically hot right now. No wonder venture capital firms 3i and Doughty Hanson & Co waded in with Series A funding of £3m in early 2006, followed by a second tranche of £6m in April last year.

The company’s flagship product, DataPatrol, uses semantic web technology to enable users to track where their personal information is held online. It’s already making waves.

Back in 2005, when Ilube persuaded Harris to launch another start-up and cut ties with Egg, Harris had three demands. Whatever it was had to be big, have massive consumer demand and he wanted direct involvement.

“Mike and I looked into emerging consumer issues,” recalls Ilube. “Even in 2005 there was a rising level of concern about access to personal data. We raised £250,000 in seed funding for research from Mike and I and other people.”

At present there were already 130,000 incidents of ID fraud per annum, and the figure is rising by 40%. “It’s the fastest growing area of crime and is becoming more organised,” says Ilube. “We talked to about 100 fraudsters about what they did and how they did it.”

“We wondered if it was possible, in an Egg-like way, to build a powerful brand to get real control over information in the online world,” says Ilube. So they commissioned brand agency Identica and Garlik was born.

The Series A finance funded the technology build, sharpened the proposition, developed the brand and raised its profile. The second round is helping to take DataPatrol, which scours the web for its users, to the mass market via ‘powered by’ propositions through broadband providers, banks and insurance firms.

For instance, Card Payment Protection has 10 million customers and now offers DataPatrol as part of an annual £69.99 identity protection solution that includes ID theft insurance, credit checks and more. With this and its other products, Garlik could take some stopping.