AimBrain, a startup that uses biometric authentication to fight fintech fraud, raises £4M Series A

AimBrain, a London startup that offers “biometric identity” as a service to help fintech companies and other financial institutions fight fraud, has raised £4 million in Series A funding.

BGF Ventures led the round, with participation from Episode 1, Entrepreneur First (EF), and a number of angel investors including Simon Rozas, Chris Mairs, and Charles Songhurst.

Founded in 2015 by Andrius Sutas and Alesis Novik whilst they both went through Entrepreneur First — and, notably, in the same cohort as Magic Pony, the EF startup that exited to Twitter for reportedly as much as $150 million — AimBrain has built biometric authentication technology to let businesses verify a customer’s identity.

This includes verification based on your voice, what your look like, and how you interact with your device, such as typing speed or the way your hand shakes — none of which is a new idea in itself.

However, one of AimBrain’s claimed key selling points is the startup’s ‘plug and play’ modular approach that enables all three forms of authentication to be used at the same time or in a granular fashion.

For example, says the startup, a bank could use behavioural authentication in the background, allowing a customer to access a banking app without the need for multiple passwords. If the same customer then phones the bank’s call centre, voice analysis could be used, while facial recognition could be used at ATMs or in-branch.

More crucially (and perhaps gracefully), if AimBrain’s behavioural analysis flags up uncertainty about a customer’s identity when they are using an app they could be asked to “step up” to facial or voice recognition, and so on.

“No single biometric is good enough in itself,” says AimBrain co-founder Andrius Sutas. “To mitigate as much risk as possible, you need a platform approach. In both testing and live production, our technology has consistently outperformed the market, even on a single module.”

Adds Henry Gladwyn, of BGF Ventures, in a statement: “We are very excited to be working with AimBrain. Their technology is exceptional and is poised to revolutionise the authentication process for financial services companies.”