Payments startup gets $2.85M in pre-seed for multi-biometric ID platform

Wink, a Texas company, has raised $2.85 million in pre-seed funding for its payments and biometric identity platform that combines face, voice, and device recognition for secure e-commerce without passwords.

It also features digital voice-printing biometrics from video to verify identities.

“There is an opportunity to simplify payments and authentication, starting with e-commerce, but eventually the entire Web3 movement,” says Deepak Jain, CEO and founder of Wink. The goal is to enable transactions that do not rely on passwords, credit account numbers or authentication devices.”

Wink uses three-factor authentication, merging two biometric modalities and tokenization. This forms a verifiable biometric identity for login and payment.

The pre-seed funding, which Wink claims was oversubscribed by $1.85 million, was led by Cerracap Ventures and incubator Carneros Bay.

Also participating, according to the company, were Tntra Ventures and executives in the payments, e-commerce, cybersecurity, ID verification, blockchain, and chip industries.

Wink is a dba (‘doing business as’ or trade name) for Payfave, a firm founded in 2021 and which raised $1.75 million in a debt offering last January, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission

Saurabh Ranjan, CEO of Cerracap, says Wink will bring biometrics-based payments and authentication to the general market.

Ranjan says Wink will take some business that Amazon might otherwise have gotten. Its platform can cut fraud, increase conversions, and promote customer loyalty, features Amazon and few others have been able to promise.

Among those few others are FinGo with vending machines that process biometric payments and age verifications; and biometrics-based payment vendor PopID.

The Wink platform will debut this fall. It is being shown to payment processors, networks, identity verification companies, e-commerce platforms, and merchants. It also will be on display at the Retail Innovation Conference & Expo in Chicago from May 10 to 12.

Executives say they are fleshing out use cases in e-commerce, Web3 payments, and connected-car payments.

Article Topics

authentication  |  biometric payments  |  face biometrics  |  fraud prevention  |  funding  |  investment  |  multi-factor authentication  |  secure transactions  |  voice biometrics  |  Wink