- Rapidly growing behavioral-biometrics company TypingDNA announced it has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Gradient Ventures
TypingDNA, a rapidly growing behavioral-biometrics company, announced it has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Gradient Ventures — which is Google’s AI-focused venture fund. EU-based fund GapMinder, Techstars Ventures, and other prior investors also joined this funding round.
Based in New York, TypingDNA launched in 2016 and the company offers a variety of developer-first solutions helping companies recognize people by the way they type. Originally, the company started out of EU (Romania) where it won a number of awards and recognition. The company moved its headquarters to New York in 2018.
TypingDNA has built proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms to authenticate users based on how they type. And through a simple training process of watching user keystrokes, TypingDNA is able to recognize further attempts from a specific user by matching them against their known account. This technology — which is known as typing biometrics — is going to enable existing applications like 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, Co-founder, and Data Scientist at TypingDNA.
TypingDNA’s Authentication API accepts is known for being able to accept user keystrokes in a standardized and open-sourced format — which allows for simple and easy integration into any desktop or mobile app. And 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. Plus TypingDNA’s mobile developer SDK also currently supports the latest version of iOS and Android applications.
“We’re excited about TypingDNA’s developer-first approach to enable people to authenticate securely based on how they type,” added 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.”
