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March 21, 2006
German voice recognition tech attracts angels
VoiceTrust, a company that develops voice-recognition systems for user identification, has raised €2M to finance the development of a consumer-oriented product and to boost its international sales growth.
It tapped high profile German angel investors, Falk Strascheg, an entrepreneur turned VC (he founded one of Germany's first VC firms, Technologieholding, which was later acquired by 3i) and Boris Anderer, a co-founder of the once high-flying ecommerce software company, Brokat Technologies (he's also a venture partner at Wellington Capital in Munich), along wtih existing investors Avida and Grazia Private Equity.
A comparison of two voice profiles. Each is unique. The software checks 1200 of 200,000 possible data points in a voice print to authenticate a user.
VoiceTrust's technology has a lot of advantages over other biometric systems in that it doesn't need scanners, such as fingerprint scanner or iris scanners, or expensive face recognition software. Rather it uses a standard phone line and some servers running its software.
We've been in touch with VoiceTrust in the past and the firm's founder has had some harrowing experiences trying to develop the market for its technology, so it is good to see that he's found some smart money to grow the business.
A recent Time magazine article said that IBM had made a strategic investment in VoiceTrust, acquiring 5 percent of the company. IBM integrates voice recognition for password resets in its helpdesk applications that it sells to large IT departments.
Founder and CEO, Michael Kramer, decided to create VoiceTrust in 2001 after having his credit card details stolen by hackers.
Kramer's idea at the time was that he would develop software that would make such criminal activity impossible. But that particular application is not how the firm makes money today, rather the software is mainly used as mentioned above, for password resets, to identify and authenticate users phoning in to change their password if they've forgotten it or lost it.
Attempted break-ins, such as using a digital recording, are prevented by a challenge/response process, basically a live test with answers to random questions supplied by the system. Both Volkswagen and Microsoft have adopted VoiceTrust for this application.
With this round, the startup has raised €5M in outside capital, it said in a statment.
Read - VOICE.TRUST durch neues Venture Capital weiterhin auf internationalem Wachstumskurs (press release)
Posted on March 21, 2006 01:55 PM | Posted to Biometrics | Venture Capital | Permalink
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