Startup of the Week: Keyless

• Keyless was founded in 2019 by Andrea Carmignani, Fabian Eberle, Dr. Giuseppe Ateniese and Dr. Paolo Gasti.
• The startup develops cutting-edge identity management and authentication solutions.
• So far, Keyless have raised $9.5 million over 5 funding rounds.

Website: https://keyless.io/

On a mission to create a passwordless future for organisations and people, our Startup of the Week for this week is Keyless!

Keyless strive to enable seamless access to any digital service, all while keeping private and personal details safe. The startup develops identity management and authentication solutions, which have been built using cutting-edge, privacy-enhancing research in biometrics and cryptography. The cybersecurity startup is building a world-first in the privacy sector – a management platform for privacy-preserving biometric authentication and personal identity.

Keyless was founded at the start of 2019 by world-renowned experts in privacy and cybersecurity – Andrea Carmignani, Fabian Eberle, Dr. Giuseppe Ateniese and Dr. Paolo Gasti. The idea for Keyless started with Andrea in 2017, who at the time was learning about blockchain technology and the transformative potential it held for digital services.

After then learning more on biometric tech around the time Apple was building FaceID, Andrea became moved by the power blockchain and decentralised applications had, and was inspired to create a solution enabling people to securely store and share digital assets.

Andrea then met co-founder Fabian on a trek in Italy just before starting their MBA at renowned business school INSEAD. The two bonded over their shared interest in disruptive technologies and planned to start a company together throughout their year of the MBA.

Picking up two additional co-founders along the way, the startup set out to create a solution where users could authenticate themselves throughout the digital world via their own body, leveraging biometric tech for this solution.

So far, Keyless have raised a total $9.5 million over the course of 5 funding rounds. Their latest (a Seed Round) was announced in April 2021, and raised $3.3 million. Last year, the startup also signed partnership agreements with Microsoft, Auth0 and OneLogin, co-founder Andrea commenting the following on the news:

“Traditional multi-factor authentication (MFA) can be cumbersome, expensive to deploy and susceptible to new attack avenues. By partnering with IAM providers, such as Microsoft, Auth0 and OneLogin, we can serve the market’s need with faster and more innovative authentication solutions, that are not only intuitive for users, but offer stronger protection against emerging mobile security and privacy threats,”