With millions of users across the Nordics, BehavioSec is the leading behavioral biometrics security company targeting the fintech industry. Northzone is pleased announce a €5 million financing round together with Octopus Ventures.
BehavioSec, an award-winning Swedish identity authentication business, has today announced the successful completion of a EUR 5m funding round led by Octopus Investments and Northzone, and alongside existing investors Conor Venture Partners and Partner Invest Norr. This investment will be used to accelerate BehavioSec’s growth worldwide, expand its permanent presence in the UK & US, support its global client base and further invest in its products.
Used by some of Europe’s largest financial institutions and millions of consumers every day, BehavioSec’s technology supports secure user verification for access to web and mobile applications. Its technology works by observing how the user interacts with a device or browser, analysing the rhythm of typing, the deftness of touch, the unique combination pressure, swipe speed, finger positioning and velocity as the user navigates within an app. This capability is known as behavioural biometrics and is applied to seamlessly add another security layer to offer increased protection with no additional hardware or cumbersome changes to the user experience.
As part of the investment, Simon Andrews of Octopus, Bjorn Stray of Northzone and Chris Barchak of Conor Venture Partners join the board of directors.
Neil Costigan, CEO at BehavioSec, said, “The last year has seen us really shake up the IT security industry with multi-million user deployments across all geographies for this new, consumer friendly, frictionless security layer. We are really excited about the future and, with the additional backing of Octopus & Northzone, our customers will see even more benefits from their decision to embrace this innovative technology.”
BehavioSec’s award winning technology has been recognised by prestigious industry bodies such as Finnovate and FinDEVr, winning the grand prize of ‘Best of Show’ at the first ever FinDEVr conference in San Francisco. It was also named one of Europe’s 100 Hottest Technology companies 2014 by Wired magazine. BehavioSec is also the only non-American company funded as part of the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Active Authentication program, a research project aimed at finding new user authentication technologies.
Simon Andrews, a member of the Ventures team at Octopus, commented,
“With this latest investment round BehavioSec will continue to expand its presence in existing sectors and further develop its tokenless security solutions to new markets. We are very much looking forward to supporting Neil, Olov and the team to achieve these goals.”
Bjorn Stray, Partner at Northzone, said, “We are thrilled about partnering with Behaviosec, who have established themselves as a leading player in behavioural biometrics, a game changing security technology. With ever increasing security threats in a world of digital-first behaviour, Behaviosec’s seamless, user-friendly continuous authentication solution is quickly gaining adoption among leading fintech and consumer internet players.”
About Octopus
Octopus is a venture capital investor who backs talented people with the potential to build big businesses. Our focus is on identifying entrepreneurs and fast growth companies that can scale explosively to create, transform or dominate an industry. The Ventures team has a proven track record of helping build exceptional global businesses, including Zoopla Property Group, Secret Escapes, SwiftKey, graze.com and YPlan.
The Ventures team is part of Octopus Investments, one of the UK’s leading growing investment management companies specialising in smaller company investing, with more than £4.7 billion of assets under management. For further information, visit us at www.octopusinvestments.com.
About Northzone
Founded in 1996, Northzone has to date raised seven funds and invested in some 100 technology-enabled companies. The current portfolio includes companies such as Spotify, Avito.ru, Trustpilot, WideSpace and SpaceApe. The company has offices in London, Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen and New York. For further information, visit us at www.northzone.com.
About Conor
Conor Venture Partners is a leading early-stage technology VC investing in the Nordics and Baltics. With 70 million euros under management, Conor invests in disruptive technologies in software, embedded systems, electronics, new materials and optics. The Conor portfolio includes companies such as Neo Technology, Supponor Systems, BehavioSec, Scoopshot, Tactotek, Verto Analytics and Omegawave. For more information, please visit www.conor.vc.
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