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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AppQuality, Italian crowdtesting platform founded in 2015 in Cremona, continues along its path towards and closes a round of investments of 3.5 million euros. CEO Luca Manara tells how they have worked to achieve this result and how they will work in the coming months by investing the new capital available.

What do you think were the factors that led you to this success?

An awful lot of much resilience, perseverance, discipline, confidence in the future and hard work. Every valuable result requires a lot of commitment, an agile, lean approach and a lot, a lot great deal of execution: there are no shortcuts. It was hard, but it was hard from the beginning, when we still didn’t even know if there was a market for what we were proposing, when the experiments we were doing didn’t give results, when the first prospects were slamming the door in our faces. But every closed door was something new that we were learning. And at the next door we would change our positioning, study the value proposition better and refine the compelling reason for buying.
Without doubt, metrics are also important: you have to go on the market, collect indicators and customers, you are not doing something of value if someone is not willing to pay for it, there are no free lunches.

How will you use the money you raise?

The entry of P101 will allow us to invest in the technology of our platform and therefore to offer companies quantitative and qualitative tools to develop the best apps and digital solutions. This will allow us to further increase the high quality and level of service we guarantee to our customers and to start working towards international expansion.
Today the User Experience drives the digital economy: companies compete in terms of UX innovation and quality in the development of digital products becomes a critical success factor. We’re entering this very field that will be increasingly central in the years to come.

Will your team change too?

The team will evolve a lot. We need to double it in a few months. Surely the figures that we will insert are both on the commercial side, to push the rate of acquisition of new customers, and also on the product development side, to further improve the services offered, the effectiveness, efficiency and quality of our solution.

Taking into consideration The Coronavirus, and the consequent push towards digital in Italy, what kind of impact are they having and what kind will they have on your business?

It’s Hard to give a precise answer: it’s a stormy sea, but I like to say that a flat sea is not for experienced seamen. In any case we are mainly experiencing positive effects. Many verticals are investing in digitization and in particular the fintech world. Many large banks are accelerating the development of their digital solutions because, if it was not clear enough before, these will be the main channel for customer acquisition and management. It is sufficient it to say that, according to some research done, 75% of the users of these solutions in the last month are new

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