Biometric tech firm Keyless has raised $2.2 million (£1.6m) in seed funding to bring its Keyless Authenticator app to market, expand its team and continue the development of Keyless’ solutions for biometric authentication and identity management.
Participants in the funding round include P1010 SGR, Maire Investments, LUISS Alumni 4 Growth, and Primomiglio SGR. The company has now raised a total of $5.75 million, including $1.35 million in government-backed startup loans.
“We cannot underestimate the security risks of remote working – without a solution that combines a zero-trust framework with biometric multi-factor authentication, corporate systems and databases are at risk of being compromised in large-scale, sophisticated hacking and phishing attacks,” said CEO Andrea Carmignani.
Using the app, a firm’s employees can access remote and contactless systems by looking into the camera of their trusted device. Biometric facial recognition and liveness detection, is processed with secure multiparty computation, a technique the firm says removes the threat of exposing raw biometric data.
The technology is compliant with GDPR and the Strong Customer Authentication requirements of PSD2, Keyless says.
“The world desperately needs innovative authentication solutions that protect both consumers and businesses from hacking, phishing and data breaches,” said Massimo Di Amato, executive director at investor Maire Investments.
“What drew us to Keyless’ passwordless solution was how it stores encrypted authentication data on a distributed-cloud network, instead of on the user’s device or on centralised servers. Storing it in this way greatly reduces the chance of biometric data being hacked if the device is compromised.”