Picked by Emerging Europe as one of its 10 start-ups to watch in 2020, pioneering behavioural biometrics firm TypingDNA has begun the year with a bang, announcing a seven million-US dollar 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.
The company had previously raised a 1.5 million US dollars seed round from investors on three continents, including founders of unicorns including UiPath and DataDog, and now has clients and partners around the world.
TypingDNA, now based in New York but founded in Oradea, in western Romania, 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 recognise 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 behavior 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,” says Raul Popa, CEO and co-founder of TypingDNA.
TypingDNA’s aAPI accepts user keystrokes in a standardised 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 both 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 the 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,” says 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.”
Founded in 2017 and based in Palo Alto, California, Gradient Ventures is Google’s AI-focused venture fund – investing in and connecting early-stage startups with Google’s resources, innovation, and technical leadership in artificial intelligence. The fund focuses on helping founders navigate the challenges in developing new technology products, allowing companies to take advantage of the latest techniques so that great ideas can come to life.
Its investment in Typing DNA is evidence that the fund is not afraid of backing start-ups with roots in emerging Europe.
