Keyless raises $2.2M to tackle enterprise breaches with face biometrics and multi-party computation

Keyless has raised $2.2 million in seed funding to provide privacy-enhancing biometric authentication to address the 37 percent increase in enterprise phishing attacks since the emergence of COVID-19 and eliminate passwords. The funds will be used to bring the 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.

Keyless raised the same amount in a pre-seed round announced last October.

“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,” states Andrea Carmignani, CEO at Keyless, in the announcement.

The company’s mission is to end large-scale data breaches, according to the announcement.

Keyless plans to carry that out with biometric facial recognition and liveness detection, with the twist of storing and processing data with multi-party computation. Encrypted fragments of data are stored on a distributed network to prevent a breached device or server from compromising private information. 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,” says Massimo Di Amato, executive director at 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.”

Keyless plans to market its authentication platform to enterprise financial services companies.

Article Topics

authentication  |  biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  funding  |  identity management  |  Keyless  |  multi-party computation  |  Zero Trust