Anonybit plans biometric product and market upgrades, builds team with $3M funding round

Anonybit has raised $3 million and says it plans to accelerate its delivery of privacy-by-design identity management technologies to enterprises. Those technologies make use of a patent-pending method of distributed storage for biometrics and other sensitive data to combat data breaches and account takeover attacks.

The funding round was led by Jam Fintop, with participation from Connecticut Innovations, and brings Anonybit to $8 million raised in total so far. The company announced $3.5 million in funding at the beginning of 2022 that Crunchbase considers a seed round.

“Anonybit’s unique, enterprise-grade technology enables financial institutions and other enterprises to safely and compliantly leverage biometric data to authenticate users.  With cybercrime a persistent and growing threat, we believe deploying enhanced methods of authentication will become table stakes for banks,” says Ryan Zacharia, managing partner at Jam Fintop.

Products from Anonybit include its FIDO-certified Genie platform for orchestrating the identity lifecycle and decentralized biometrics, and services for storage, liveness detection, and both 1:1 and 1:N matching.

CEO and Co-founder Frances Zelazny tells Biometric Update in an email that the funds will be used to fuel further technology development, as well as bringing it to new customers and partners.

“Now that we have validation with some beach head accounts, we understand how customers want to adopt Anonybit and the critical use cases that they see us solving for,” Zelazny says. “One of the key tenets of our strategy has always been to enable the whole identity ecosystem, and that means engaging with both partners and direct end users.”

Zelazny’s co-founder is Yaron Azizi, a veteran of the 8200 cybersecurity unit within the Israel Defense Force, and initial architect of BioCatch’s behavioral biometrics platform.

“Many players in the industry aim to expand their offerings to address more comprehensive use cases in identity, but only Anonybit can get us out of the current paradigm by making it safe to store biometrics,” Zelazny comments in the announcement. “This key differentiator is crucial for account recovery and eliminates the need to fall back on inferior, knowledge-based authenticators, passwords and more, whether online, in a branch, at a call center or in a chat channel.”

The importance of properly connecting the various parts of the identity lifecycle, including account recovery,  was explained by Zelazny in a Biometric Update webinar earlier this year.

Leadership team grows

Anonybit has also announced a pair of key hires, appointing Limor Elbaz as chief revenue officer and Al Pascual to its board of advisors. Elbaz has played sales leadership roles at Imperva and Peerlyst, while Pascual is a former Javelin Research industry analyst and co-founder of Breach Clarity, which was recently acquired by TransUnion.

“Having dedicated a substantial portion of my career to the field of fraud and identity, I’ve witnessed numerous solutions that often feel like reactionary fixes,” said Al Pascual. “Anonybit, however, stands out as a pioneering solution that gets to the root cause of the problem, helping to ensure that people really are who they claim to be across the user journey, eliminating the gaps that attackers exploit. I am excited to be joining a team with a proven track record in this industry and I am eager to leverage my expertise to help promote this pioneering technology so it is adopted as quickly as possible.”

Article Topics

Anonybit  |  appointments  |  biometrics  |  decentralized biometrics  |  funding  |  identity management