New round & new projects for KEYLESS
Keyless, a biometric recognition platform, has collected a round of 2.2 million dollars. The capital increase was subscribed by P101 SGR, Primomiglio SGR, Maire Investments, LUISS Alumni 4 Growth and other international investors. We asked co founder Fabian Eberle to tell us their next steps
With this round how much capital have you raised in total so far and how are you investing it?
To date, we’ve raised $6.2million in total. We’ll use the funds to scale our operations to serve more users, recruit talent in the areas of security, machine learning, cryptography and distributed systems, and expand our product suite for workforce and consumer authentication.
In your opinion what are your greatest strengths that “convince” investors to bet on you?
One of our core strengths is our founding and leadership team of world-leading academics and security experts, with decades of experience at the intersection of advanced cryptography and biometrics, and building products for national security and regulated sectors.
Together, our team has made several breakthroughs in the area of secure, private, and distributed biometric authentication. These breakthroughs are now being materialized in real-world applications for the first time in history – and are the reason we’ve received so much interest from both investors and clients alike.
How did the lockdown impact your business? Such as?
The main impact our business had as a result of the lockdowns was the inability to travel. We consider ourselves a global, remote-first team, with offices in Rome, London and Singapore, and a global itinerary of meetings and conferences planned for the year.
Despite the obvious disruptions lockdowns have caused, we were able to quickly adjust to the new way of working. We’ve implemented daily stand ups from the beginning, scheduled regular meetings and check-ins and have done our best to ensure our team is still functioning to the best of their abilities despite being remote-only for an extended period of time.
What are your goals for the next 12 months?
This year we plan to accelerate our go-to-market efforts within Europe, followed by a gradual expansion into global markets such as Asia and the booming digital payments market in the region. We’ll also continue building our proprietary biometric authentication and identity management solutions for enterprise and consumer use-cases.
In your opinion, how is the cybersecurity sector developing in Italy? What kind of awareness do companies have of its importance today?
Italy was one of the first European countries to be hit by the novel coronavirus, and unfortunately, that meant that businesses and people here were targeted by cybercriminals looking to exploit the lockdown. The silver lining of this was that people, not just in Italy, but worldwide, started waking up to the mounting security threats that exist in the online realms.
In terms of the cybersecurity sector, the Italian government has taken measures to make it more lucrative for startups to operate from Italy. As a result, there are a number of impressive startups headquartered in, or operating out of here, with new, powerful technology that directly tackles the challenges with identity and personal data management, privacy and cybersecurity on the whole.
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