Behavioural-biometrics company TypingDNA raised a USD 7 million Series A round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund, with the participation of GapMinder Ventures and Techstars Ventures, as well as other prior investors.
GapMinder invested USD 1.2 million Series A in this new round. In November 2018, TypingDNA obtained a previous investment of USD 1.5 million from a GapMinder lead Seed Series, with the participation of other investors from United States, Great Britain and Romania.
TypingDNA has developed proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms to authenticate users based on how they type. Through a simple training process of watching user keystrokes, TypingDNA can recognize further attempts from a specific user by matching them against their known account. This technology, known as typing biometrics, will enable existing applications such as authentication, fraud detection, password recovery, and online education assessment to fingerprint users more securely than traditional forms of two-factor authentication.
“Advancing the research and distribution of typing biometrics is of global importance. Keyboards are incorporated in almost any device today, making typing behaviour the most widely available user biometric. This round of funding will allow us to further our mission to provide user-friendly, non-intrusive biometrics and increased security to people around the world”, said Raul Popa, CEO and Co-founder at TypingDNA.
The company’s Authentication API accepts user keystrokes in a standardized and open-sourced format allowing simple and easy integration into any desktop or mobile application. Developers can implement TypingDNA’s API as a passive two-factor authentication option, password recovery method, or simply to ensure inputs are matched to a given user. TypingDNA’s mobile developer SDK also currently supports the latest version of iOS and Android applications.
TypingDNA is currently ACE compliant for verifying students online, and European Banking Authority considers typing biometrics to be compliant for SCA regulation (2FA in banking and payments in EU), as a consequence the company is experiencing great demand from the industry.
The company plans to use this new investment to expand its developer support network and offer more tools to integrate their API with existing website development platforms.
“We’re excited about TypingDNA’s developer-first approach to enable people to authenticate securely based on how they type,” said Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures. “With global regulation impacting face-recognition-based authentication and hackers targeting SMS-based two-factor authentication, typing biometrics is the best form of identifying people without compromising privacy or security”.
“TypingDNA is revolutionary in the authentication area. Its state of the art proprietary technology allows second factor or multifactor authentication based on typing biometrics in a highly reliable, and non-compromising way. And all these in a non-expensive way and easily interacting with existing systems or applications. Their recently launched mobile product is unique in the market and comes as complementary to the existing TypingDNA API. We are excited about TypingDNA’s vision and evolution, and are comfortable to further support their international hyper-growth, beyond the current USD 8.5 million financing raised by TypingDNA in Seed and Series A rounds”, declares Dan Mihaescu, Founding Partner of GapMinder.
Since January 2018, when it was created, until now, GapMinder invested in 31 companies and reached a threshold of EUR 40 million as fund size.
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