Investment pours in for biometric startups developing new services

Biometrics firms Smile Identity, Zenus and OneWave are reporting successful funding rounds for products ranging from ‘ethical facial recognition’ to smartcards with inbuilt fingerprint readers.

Investment fund selects Smile Identity for follow-on

Future Africa announces that it has selected Smile Identity to offer to its syndicate as an investment opportunity, following the firm’s successful Series A.

Future Africa describes the benefits of Smile Identity’s approach and business opportunity after the firm recently secured $7 million in Series A funding.

Smile Identity provides KYC via selfie biometric verification of the individual, using facial recognition to match the photo against the record held of their ID in a government database. To do this it establishes APIs with the databases.

Future Africa selects startups across Africa and vets them before offering the investment opportunity to its syndicate of members.

Milestone for Zenus investment

‘Ethical’ artificial intelligence-based surveillance firm Zenus announces passing the 700-mark for crowdfunding investors, taking this round of investment to over $450,000 so far.

Launched in October 2020, this round followed an almost $1.2 million round from unnamed backers. The crowdfunding round, via StartEngine, has a target of $1.07 million, valuing the company at $10 million.

The company states that its service, which monitors an area to calculate volumes of visitors and analyze their makeup and behavior with face biometrics, can also determine whether individuals have enough space during the COVID-19 pandemic.

OneWave raises €600,000

OneWave took to Twitter to announce (in French) that it has raised over €600,000 ($713,000) from private investors. The money will be used for the marketing of its OneWaveCard.

The multi-purpose smartcard contains an inbuilt fingerprint biometrics scanner and display. Its functions cover two-factor authentication, password management as well as being able to operate as a physical card for multiple payment and loyalty credentials held in an accompanying smartphone digital wallet.

Article Topics

biometric cards  |  biometrics  |  crowdfunding  |  digital identity  |  facial recognition  |  funding  |  identity verification  |  investment  |  OneWave  |  Smile Identity  |  startup  |  Zenus