Behavioral biometrics market moves: Elisity raises $26M, D4t4 platform launch, BehavioSec patents

Cybersecurity startup Elisity has raised $26 million in Series A funding to scale its digital identity and behavioral biometrics-based enterprise platform, dubbed Cognitive Trust. The announcement coincides with a new behavioral biometrics platform launch by D4t4 and a pair of patents granted to BehavioSec.

The funding round was led by Two Bear Capital and AllegisCyber Capital, and included the participation of seed investor Atlantic Bridge.

The company was founded by three co-founders with a common past in leadership roles in product development, architecture, and engineering at Cisco, according to the announcement.

The Cognitive Trust platform is delivered through the cloud to analyze the identity and context of people, apps, and devices, with dynamic adaptation from the edge to the cloud, Elisity says. It does so by learning behaviour to carry out risk assessments to continuously optimize digital asset protection. The company also says the platform is intelligent enough to understand the connections of people and devices beyond the corporate perimeter to inform dynamic adaptation.

“When the security perimeter is no longer the network, we see an incredible opportunity to evolve the way enterprises connect and protect their people and their assets, moving away from strict network constructs to identity and context as the basis for secure access,” says Elicity CEO James Winebrenner. “With Elisity, customers can dispense with the complexity, cost and protracted timeline enterprises usually encounter. We can onboard a new customer in as little as 45 minutes, rather than months or years, moving them to an identity-based access policy, and expanding to their cloud and on-prem footprints over time without having to rip and replace existing identity providers and network infrastructure investments. We do this without making tradeoffs between productivity for employees and the network security posture.”

Behavioral biometrics platform launched by D4t4

D4t4 has launched the Celebrus Fraud Detection Platform to protect businesses’ customers with real-time insights from behavioral biometrics across all digital touchpoints to eliminate new account fraud, account takeovers and fraudulent payments.

Celebrus FDP also reduces false positives by applying continuous authentication, which according to the announcement enables more accurate and sophisticated detection for improved customer experiences. The platform identifies unusual online interactions in real-time, integrates into existing fraud detection and investigation systems, and provides businesses with a high degree of control, D4t4 says.

The announcement points to the rising fraud rates in the financial services industry as an indication of its addressable market.

“We’re experiencing the perfect storm,” states Pete Kear, CEO, D4t4 Solutions. “With dramatic shifts to digital commerce over the last year and an increase in cyber threats from bad actors, organizations across banking, retail, household goods, entertainment, and others, are working to fend off fraudsters. But, unfortunately, existing solutions can’t fully analyze behaviors to protect customers from fraud before it occurs.”

Initial partnerships and integrations include Quantexa, Teradata, and SAS.

BehavioSec extends behavioral biometrics capabilities with two patents

BehavioSec has been granted a pair of patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, extending the company’s behavioral biometrics to further granularity on Android devices and social engineering detection across device types.

The company says its patent for ‘Continuous authentication based on motion input data’ allows it to double the amount of actionable intelligence yielded up by each keystroke on an Android device, through data such as starting coordinates, ending coordinates, and timestamps on key-up actions from the use of a virtual keyboard on the display.

“This field is hampered by a severe lack of data, especially regarding gestures performed on virtual keyboards,” the inventors write. “Many external applications on devices do not report key press down timings. If they do, the timings are often inaccurate. For example, a keyboard recording swipes to form a word can deliver only the last timestamp of the swiped word. Since such word forming can take a long time, this means that a lot of digitizer time sampling information is lost. Accordingly, there is therefore a need for a method for recording accurate key timings, especially on virtual keyboards, for purposes of both initial and continuous user authentication.”

The end result, they say, is “an accurate behavioral biometrics authentication in the operating system kernel, which is continuously running in the background for whatever application a user interacts with.”

The patent for a ‘Method and a device for denying or nullifying a specific online transaction carried out by an authorized user who is coached by a fraudster’ extends a patent granted to BehavioSec in 2019 of the same name. The extension improves the detection and blocking of social engineering at scale, according to the announcement.

“In order to reduce fraudulent activity, customers need to be protected where it matters most, their digital identity,” comments Neil Costigan, CEO at BehavioSec. “These additions to our patent portfolio are geared towards increasing visibility and improving detection capabilities to offer our customers the most comprehensive security, fighting fraud before it happens.”

BehavioSec also recently achieved SOC 2 compliance certification, and upgraded its behavioral biometrics platform with faster biometric enrollment and automated future behavior prediction.

Article Topics

behavioral biometrics  |  Behaviosec  |  biometrics  |  continuous authentication  |  cybersecurity  |  D4t4  |  digital identity  |  Elisity  |  fraud prevention  |  funding  |  patents