The year that pushed the world to passwordless

Like all businesses, new and old, we’ve had our company direction rerouted by the result of unprecedented travel restrictions, lockdowns, a global recession, and the tumultuous political and social movements that captured and held the attention of people all around the world.

How far we’ve come in just one year

At this time last year, we’d only just finished building out our platform’s core technology — the Keyless Protocol. The Keyless Protocol combines privacy-enhancing technologies with modern biometrics to enable real-time biometric authentication powered by the Keyless Network. The Keyless Network utilizes a distributed cloud architecture to process and store encrypted authentication data.

Breakthroughs in biometric authentication

We successfully applied for five patents to date for our novel technology — of these, one is a non-provisional patent, and four are provisional. Our breakthroughs in privacy-first, distributed biometric authentication are enabling a shift away from device-dependent authentication, towards a more unified and user-friendly authentication experience.

Ensuring Privacy and Security Compliance

Since biometric data is considered sensitive, personal information, the use of biometrics is regulated in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, and other similar regulations around the world such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States.

In total we’ve completed five compliance assessments this year, and have been actively engaging industry alliances, such as the FIDO Alliance, to educate certification bodies around the benefits of applying privacy-enhancing technologies and distributed cloud systems to biometric-enabled authentication.

Rapid growth, and US $6.2 million in backing

This year we not only scaled our team, going from 15 to 32 employees in under twelve months, which forced us to move into brand new offices in the centers of Rome and London. We also brought our funding to US $6.2 million — a tremendous sign of confidence in uncertain times.

In just one year, we’ve managed to build, test and launch a total of five products that serve the full spectrum of enterprise use cases for workforce and consumer passwordless authentication.

Partnering with Cisco to help universities adapt quickly to remote-learning

One of the achievements our team is most proud of is the first commercial deployment of our passwordless authentication technology in the education sector.

10 customers, 5 sectors, 3 continents

Luiss University was our first live commercial deployment, however we currently have a number of customers in the Banking and Fintech and Aerospace and Defense industries who are all currently testing Keyless in pilot stage within their organizations.

$600k secured in awards and recognized by Gartner

Bans on international travel this year didn’t stop us from being invited to participate in a number of technology and cybersecurity competitions around the world. Some of these competitions have awarded us with cash-prizes, which are going directly into improving our product and services. A special thanks to B2B Startup in South EuropeStartup in ItalyBNP ParibasStartup in Slingshot 2020 Global and Banking Tech Awards.

Our co-founder, Fabian Eberle, talks about the future of enterprise security and biometric authentication in this short video.

What does the next year hold?

Out of darkness often comes light, and so we are hoping that as we head into a fresh year, that despite the urge to return to normal, that we are able to maintain the momentum gained during the last twelve months.