Think about the last time you changed jobs, rented a flat, or applied for a mortgage. At each of those moments, someone needed to verify who you are and what you earn. Every single time, the experience was slow, manual, fragmented and vulnerable to fraud. Employment verification took up to 14 days on average. Data was sitting locked in payroll systems and was passed around via email and PDF. For the businesses requesting it, the process was expensive and inefficient. For the consumers going through it, it was a source of real anxiety at already stressful life moments.

There was no single source of instant employment and income data. Nobody had fixed it but Konfir was built to change that.

The referral came from Will Mason - part of the Love Ventures community, ex-Experian and founder of Infact - who introduced us to Chris Milligan in March 2022. We tracked the business carefully before committing to its seed raise the following year. 

Chris had the founder-market fit to take on this problem. He’d previously built and exited Adepto, an HR tech business acquired by Degreed, scaling it to millions in annual revenue and a team of 55. He understood the employer services landscape from the inside. When he started Konfir in late 2021, his mission was clear: remove the friction from life events by creating a streamlined, transparent and connected process for employment and income verification.

At Love Ventures, since we usually first invest early, our investment criteria puts significant weight on founder-market fit. We want to back people who have lived the problem, who understand the landscape they’re entering and who have demonstrated they can execute. Chris ticked every box. He’d done it before, in a similar market and he was going after a significantly bigger opportunity a second time around.

We backed Konfir at seed in early 2023, alongside Triple Point and Portfolio Ventures. At the time, the business was showing early product-market fit: connected activities - their core billable metric - had been doubling month-on-month since launch. They were the first government-certified provider of employment and income data globally, giving them a meaningful head start over legacy solutions.

What happened over the following two years was the kind of execution that makes early-stage investing worthwhile:

• More than 5,000 organisations signed up to the platform

• Hundreds of thousands of consumers were helped through critical life moments

• The mission articulated in our investment memo remained entirely unchanged

That last point deserves emphasis. In a market where startups often pivot under pressure, Konfir stayed laser-focussed. The same problem, the same approach, the same conviction. That clarity is what caught Experian’s attention.

Joining Experian gives Konfir the infrastructure to go further. Access to Experian’s broader verification data sets - credit data, enhanced banking insights, richer payroll attributes - will be embedded directly into the Konfir platform alongside its existing Open Banking, HMRC and Document Processing capabilities.

Chris will continue to lead Konfir within Experian, and the team he’s built will carry the mission forward. The technology, the product and the purpose all continue - at greater scale.

We’re also delighted to share that Chris is joining Love Ventures as a Venture Partner. He will contribute to our deal pipeline and work alongside our portfolio founders - bringing the hard-won operator experience of someone who has built and now exited twice. It’s an incredibly exciting addition to the team.

This exit is significant beyond the return. It validates the thesis we have held since day one: back founders who have lived the problem, who stay obsessively focussed and who have the credibility and resilience to execute over time.

At five years old, FCA regulated and now with our first successful exit, Love Ventures is building a track record. The broader Fund III portfolio continues to perform strongly, with three significant new funding up-rounds expected to complete in the coming weeks.

To Chris and the entire Konfir team: your execution has been exceptional. To our co-investors at Triple Point, Portfolio Ventures and every angel who backed the vision early - thank you. Also, a particular note of thanks to Will Mason, whose referral brought Konfir into our world.

This is the first exit. There will be more.