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Behavioral-biometrics company TypingDNA, a Romanian start-up has announced on January 4 that it raised a USD 7 million Series A round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. Other participants include EU-based fund GapMinder, Techstars Ventures, among others, businesswire.com reported.
TypingDNA, set up by Romanian Raul Popa and Cristian Tamas in Oradea four years ago, 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 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,” said Raul Popa, CEO and Co-founder at TypingDNA.
“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,” said in his turn 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.
TypingDNA obtained a previous investment of USD 1.5 M in January 2019 from GapMinder, but with the participation of some investors from USA and UK.
Previously, TypingDNA got more funds from Gecad Ventures, controlled by Romanian businessman Radu Georgescu, but also from other local entrepreneurs such as Adrian Gheară, Alex Negrea, Dan Mihăescu and Lucian Todea.
In 2018, the Romanian start-up was admitted to join the Techstars New York business accelerator, and it was then when TypingDNA relocated its office to New York.
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