ID R&D raises $5.7M to accelerate international anti-spoof, voice and behavioral biometric sales

May 30, 2019 | Chris Burt

ID R&D has raised $5.7 million in Series A funding to expand its engineering team and accelerate marketing and international sales for its artificial intelligence-based voice and behavioral biometrics and anti-spoofing technologies for voice and face recognition.

The funding round was led by GSR Ventures, with participation from existing investor Gagarin Capital. The company says is has been operating a cash-flow positive business since 2017, after launching in 2016, and doubled its total number of sales contract last year.

ID R&D also recently opened a West Coast headquarters to accommodate the doubling of its staff, and grew its customer base in Q1 2019 by 25 percent, adding a major biometrics integrator and a semiconductor company.

“What we’ve consistently heard from our customers is that ID R&D’s technologies and solutions stand alone in offering a vastly simplified user experience that doesn’t sacrifice the security of authentication,” says ID R&D CEO Alexey Khitrov. “With Grand View Research forecasting the speech and voice recognition market size to reach nearly $32 billion by 2025, businesses are racing to keep up with demand for authentication that works across multiple platforms and is as convenient as it is secure. We’re committed to leading the market with new science-driven capabilities and building on the confidence and trust our customers have placed in us.”

The company’s Chief Science Officer and Co-founder Konstantin Simonchik told Biometric Update last October that ID R&D’s work extracting the ‘x-vector’ from voice data with a convolutional neural network makes it more accurate with a small volume of authentication input. Offerings now include standalone technical components and packaged products for voice and behavioral biometrics, and voice and face anti-spoofing, according to the announcement. These technologies can be applied to mobile apps, web apps, chatbots, conversational interfaces, and messaging platforms.

“As we talk to CTOs and CISOs, it’s clear that rapid expansion in the prevalence and functionality of voice-enabled applications and devices has increased the need to protect these access points and the services they provide,” says GSR Ventures Partner Sunny Kumar. “ID R&D has developed the best voice biometric authentication solution, providing a critical layer of security to these devices. We are thrilled to be partnering with ID R&D to make voice biometrics the new standard in authentication.”

ID R&D also launched audio event detection software for security and safety monitoring in March.