IronVest, a company focusing on biometric, account-access security that protects personal accounts and personal data from fraud, emerges today from stealth mode and announces it has closed a $23 million seed funding round led by Accomplice, with participation from Trust Ventures, Ulysses, Joule Ventures, OurCrowd and a number of strategic angel investors.
Data compromises, which often lead to online fraud, affected more than 53 million people in the United States during the first half of the year. The prevalence of these incidents underscores the need for IronVest’s innovative approach.
While most cybersecurity solutions concentrate on infrastructure and endpoints, IronVest focuses on protecting the individual. Its security-first approach uses a decentralized infrastructure to protect personal data and uses patent-pending, decentralized biometric fraud prevention technology to ensure only the correct person can access the most sensitive accounts and data during sign-in and throughout a session.
IronVest’s security-first approach, combined with a seamless biometric-based user experience, guarantees privacy and protects users from the most common and the most sophisticated attacks against individuals. It protects users’ personally identifiable information by offering on-the-fly use of masked email addresses, virtual phone numbers and virtual credit cards to protect user privacy and reduce the personal data footprint vulnerable to data breaches.
IronVest is available as a mobile app, a browser extension and via an enterprise software development kit. It is designed to help financial institutions and online businesses protect consumers, customers and employees from fraud. Its consumer app already has more than 200,000 active users.
“Building a security and privacy-first infrastructure that leverages decentralized biometric authentication and anonymized PII to combat rising cyberattacks and digital threats while actually reducing friction and improving the user experience for users is at the core of our mission,” said Avi Turgeman, IronVest co-founder and CEO. “I’ve spent my entire professional life designing biometric fraud detection systems for the world’s largest financial institutions. At IronVest, we are moving beyond fraud detection and are focused on empowering individuals to get 360-degree protection from all types of fraud without relying on the online services they are using to do this for them.”
Accomplice’s Managing Partner Jeff Fagnan said, “Avi and the team are creating a new paradigm in personal security and privacy by focusing on the individual. The vast majority of existing cybersecurity companies attempt to solve the problem through infrastructure and endpoint users. IronVest’s groundbreaking solution instead applies decentralized infrastructure and biometric technologies, eliminating the possibility an unauthorized user gains access to the most important and sensitive data.”
The seed investment capital will be used to expand the team and accelerate its go-to-market efforts to meet the demands of consumer and employee security and privacy threats.
Turgeman, was previously founder and chief technology officer of BioCatch, a market-leader in behavioral biometric fraud detection. Turgeman joins fellow co-founders, Chief Technology Officer Kfir Yeshayahu, Chief Marketing Officer Guy Bauman and Vice President of Product Yaron Dror. Turgeman and Yeshayahu originally met and worked together in the Israeli military’s elite 8200 intelligence unit. Prior to launching IronVest, Turgeman, Bauman and Dror were founding team members at the mobile-commerce startup platform Tapingo, which Grubhub acquired in 2018.
For more information, visit IronVest at https://ironvest.com
