Google’s AI venture fund leads USD 7 mln financing for Romanian tech startup

Romanian behavioral-biometrics startup TypingDNA raised USD 7 million in a Series A financing round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund.

Venture capital funds GapMinder Ventures, Techstars Ventures and Credo Ventures, as well as other prior investors also participated in this financing.

TypingDNA 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 currently ACE compliant for verifying students online, and European Banking Authority considers typing biometrics to be compliant for SCA regulation (2FA in banking and payments in EU), as a consequence the company is experiencing great demand from the industry.

TypingDNA plans to use this new investment to expand its developer support network and offer more tools to integrate their API with existing website development platforms.

In November 2018, TypingDNA obtained a USD 1.5 million Seed financing led by GapMinder, with the participation of other investors from United States, Great Britain and Romania. GapMinder invested USD 1.2 million in the Seed A round.

“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 Dan Mihaescu, Founding Partner of GapMinder.