Toronto-based Bioynm Inc. has closed its first major round of financing to the tune of $14 million. This Series A round was led by Ignition Partners and Relay Ventures and also included Export Development Canada (EDC), MasterCard, and Salesforce Ventures.
Earlier this spring we brought to you the story of the Nymi Band: Bionym’s answer to persistent security. To bring everyone up to speed, the Nymi Band is Bionym’s potential replacement for all your identification cards: Your driver’s licence, your health card and even your passport. Instead of carrying different pieces of ID, the founders of Bionym believe the Nymi Band (which measures an individual’s unique ECG (heartbeat signature) make identity easier and offer people “persistent identity.”
“Bionym is playing an important role in driving the convergence of authentication and personalization,” said John Albright, co-founder and managing partner at Relay Ventures in a press release issued this morning. “Bionym is a game-changer in that they are the only ones putting ownership of authentication into the hands of the consumer.” (Note: Relay Ventures was also an investor in Bionym’s seed round of funding.)
According to its website, Bionym is continuing to focus on having Nymi be the leader for “persistent, trusted identity.” “This is a significant milestone for Bionym,” said Karl Martin, CEO and founder of Bionym. “This round of financing is providing us with the resources needed to bring the platform to market. We continue to grow our world-class team, solving hard problems around persistent authentication, seamless and trusted interactions, and hyper-personalization of experiences. We’re at the forefront of a revolution in identity-based interactions with devices and services, and our momentum continues to grow with the support of our investors and strategic partners.”
We reached out to Martin to ask what this round of financing will mean to his company.
“This funding will give us the necessary resources and tools to help us build not only our consumer hardware, but also the ecosystem of applications and integrations, through developer relations and innovative partnerships,” said Martin. “It will also help us build out a world-class team so that we can continue building the Nymi platform around compelling application experiences.”