A Scottish biometrics company has secured £300K towards the growth of its FingerSwipe product.
Yarg Biometrics, formed in 2004, has secured the funding package, made up of private and public sector investment, through the Upstarts investment vehicle, a subsidiary business of the Strathclyde University Incubator. This is the second Upstarts deal and follows on from Cascade Technologies, which raised in excess of £1m.
Applications for the FingerSwipe are wide ranging, the makers claim, but will include managing controlled door entry systems in hospitals to avoid unauthorised access to restricted areas, cashless systems in school dinner halls and as a result reduce the stigma of free school dinner tickets and allow faster serving to the children. The replacement of the traditional ‘clocking in’ systems used by businesses across the world is a reality, it is claimed.
The product does not use the traditional biometric system of taking actual fingerprints but uses a thermal strip sensor to pick up the small temperature differences between the ridges and valleys of the skin. This creates a much faster (up to 100 times compared to existing thumbprint systems) and highly secure system, it is claimed.
No actual ‘fingerprint’ images are stored by the product but the features gathered during a swipe are converted into a thermal bio-template that is stored for matching purposes. Stored templates cannot be converted back into fingerprints, thus avoiding civil liberty fingerprinting issues, the company adds.
What they say
Alan Cunningham, Managing Director at Yarg Biometrics said, "The market for biometric products has grown significantly in the past two years and is predicted to reach $2.6 billion by 2006 (see notes). The ‘FingerSwipe’ product was initially created for the education market but it is clear there are many more sectors which want to make use of it including hospitals, business premises and the leisure industry. Essentially, this product can manage a cashless system in a school dinner hall, control door entry systems to restricted areas in a hospital or even replacing the traditional ‘clocking in’ systems used in businesses across the world, but it can effectively be used for any database application."
