Mobai wins Norwegian Research Council grant for user-controlled shareable biometrics

Facial biometrics company Mobai has won a 12.3 million Norwegian kroner (US$1.2 million) grant from the Research Council of Norway (Norges forskningsråd) to research new methods for secure credential binding in digital wallets.

The project is focused on user-controlled shareable biometrics and conducted in collaboration with research institution Simula, University of Leuven (KU Leuven) and Partisia, an identity solutions company focusing on multi-party computation (MPC).

Biometric data stored in credentials and accessed through apps can be exposed in unencrypted form, introducing a risk of data leakage or theft.

The project participants will work on authentication with face biometrics using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and multi-party computation to avoid exposing the sensitive personal data. The use of FHE enables the processing of encrypted data, and MPC distributes that processing to protect the source data.

Simula will lead research into applied cryptography for the project, and the Nordic-Baltic eID project (NOBID) will evaluate the demonstrated technologies based on real-world scenarios.

The project is designed to address challenges in cross-border identification and ID fraud, Mobai says on LinkedIn.

“We’ll explore new methods for secure credential binding in digital wallets while ensuring compliance with GDPR, eIDAS 2.0, and the EU AI Act,” says Mobai. “Beyond the technical aspects, the project provides legal and ethical insights that can shape future guidelines for responsible biometric data use — contributing to UN SDG 16.9: Legal Identity for All.”

The firm was founded in 2019 as a spin-off from the Norwegian Biometrics Laboratory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Last year, it secured 30 million Norwegian kroner (roughly US$2.8 million) in an oversubscribed seed financing round from investors such as TD Veen investment firm, former Google and Twitter executive Patrick Pichette and Oslo consultancy Protonic Partners.

The company previously announced €2.8 million in funding for a project to strengthen face biometrics systems’ security for Norway’s banking industry near the end of 2021.

Mobai’s offerings include biometric face verification, liveness detection, injection attack detection, deepfake detection, and morphing attack detection. The company is one of the deepfake protection software vendors profiled in the “2025 Deepfake Detection Market Report & Buyer’s Guide,” compiled by Biometric Update with Goode Intelligence.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  digital wallets  |  homomorphic encryption  |  legal identity  |  Mobai  |  multi-party computation  |  Norway  |  Partisia  |  research and development  |  responsible biometrics  |  SDG 16.9