Anonybit, a NYC and Tel Aviv, Israel-based decentralized biometrics company, closed $3.5m in funding.
The round was led by Switch Ventures with participation from NextGen Venture Partners, Industry Ventures, Preceptor Capital, and several strategic angel investors.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its work with embedded partners and enterprises in support of the need for data protection and enhanced digital security.
Founded by longtime cybersecurity executive and biometric industry veteran, Frances Zelazny; Yaron Azizi, former IDF 8200 and initial platform design architect for BioCatch, the behavioral biometrics leader, and Shaked Vax, former product management and market innovation lead at Trusteer (acquired by IBM), Anonybit has developed a decentralized biometrics infrastructure that addresses a need for improved management of personal data and digital assets across a wide range of use cases.
Anonybit splits sensitive data, like biometrics, private keys and other digital assets, into anonymized bits that are distributed throughout a vast peer-to-peer network of nodes. The system then applies multi-party computing and zero knowledge proofs in a proprietary, patented manner in order to conduct matching functions in a decentralized way.
The company offers three products:
- Decentralized identity cloud for biometric solution and identity service providers to use with their algorithms and build privacy-preserving identity solutions;
- Decentralized biometric authentication for enterprises and embedded partners, leveraging liveness detection, biometric matching, decentralized storage and integration into orchestration systems;
- Digital asset vault for private keys, backup passphrases, crypto assets and more, utilizing the platform’s biometric authentication capabilities to ensure that only the authorized user has access to these assets.
In addition to Andy Walter, serving on the company’s board of advisors are John Checco, former head of innovation for Bank of America; Ret. Ambassador Robert Gelbard, formerly U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia and Bolivia, and Special Envoy to the Balkans; Bob Seeman, privacy lawyer and bitcoin expert; and Yao Huang, founder of The Hatchery, an incubator for early stage companies based in New York. Paul Arnold, Managing Partner of Switch Ventures, and Avi Turgeman, co-founder and CEO of Ironvest and co-founder of BioCatch, VocalZoom and Tapingo, are on the Board of Directors.
Anonybit has recently announced several implementations and partnerships including Abine, powering the first decentralized password manager; FacePhi Biometria whose facial matching technology is being adapted to Anonybit’s decentralized identity cloud, allowing enterprises the ability to better secure their customer’s accounts without storing identity data on their own servers; and DropVault, where Anonybit provides users strong authentication for their B2B encrypted document sharing vault.
FinSMEs
18/01/2022