Callsign raises $35M for deep learning authentication platform
Callsign has closed a $35 million Series A funding round, led by Accel and early stage investor PTB Ventures, for a deep learning-based authentication platform which provides adaptive access control for enterprises, according to a report by Techcrunch.
Founded in 2012, the company’s Intelligence Driven Authentication (IDA) platform is able to verify the authorized owner of the device from a swipe on the touchscreen.
Other investors that participated in the funding round include Allegis Capital and David DeWalt’s NightDragon Security.
With financial institution clients such as Lloyds Bank and Deutsche Bank, the company has deployed its platform “to hundreds of thousands of users” globally since launching it 18 months ago.
The company is looking to expand its customer base, with deployments beginning “across verticals — government, retail, healthcare, legal & accounting and telecoms”.
This latest investment round will help scale up sales, marketing, support and engineering across geographies, such as in the U.S., Far & Middle East, said Callsign founder and CEO Zia Hayat.
As part of this expansion, Callsign will open additional offices in the Bay Area and New York City in the next few months.
Callsign’s authentication platform combines multi-factor authentication with deep learning-powered fraud analytics to adapt to potentially suspicious signals to prevent unauthorized logins.
As such, the platform enables enterprises to mitigate the risk of unauthorized access in the event that login credentials have been stolen or compromised.
IDA does not replace any existing authenticator technologies. Instead, it is designed to enable businesses to better deploy these technologies based on the intelligence that enterprises collect and the policies they configure.
Hayat said the platform works by analyzing various signals in real-time, relating to each login attempt.
The system then prompts the user to complete “the most appropriate security challenge(s)” based on its analysis of “hundreds of data-points”, which could include a password, PIN, fingerprint, face, voice biometric, or “even nothing”, at the login.
Hayat said the platform’s core technology comprises of “AI and crypto mechanisms combined with a highly intuitive policy manager.”
“We have several patents (both granted and filed) as well as trade secrets,” Hayat said. “We have developed our own unique AI models in-house based upon a combination of techniques that our team (mainly ex-BAE Systems and Lloyds Banking Group data scientists) have developed in the deep learning space.”
The platform takes approximately six to 10 logins to “sufficiently train” the platform to identify each user. Additionally, the platform has a false rejection rate of “less than 0.00005 percent”, and a false acceptance rate of “less than 0.00002 percent, according to Hayat.
Article Topics
access control | authentication | biometrics | Callsign | deep learning | funding
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