Company: Anonybit, New York, NY
Company Description: Founded in 2018 and commercialized in 2021, Anonybit is the first fully decentralized biometrics infrastructure used by embedded partners and enterprises to enhance personal privacy and digital security. Supporting all biometric modalities and other personal data across the identity management lifecycle, Anonybit is poised to revolutionize the way personal data is managed and used.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Technical Innovation of the Year - At Organizations With Up to 100 Employees
 Nomination Title: Anonybit Decentralized Biometrics Infrastructure
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length about the achievements of the nominated organization since 1 January 2020, OR written answers to the questions for this category? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the nominated video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video.
https://youtu.be/W600bDTYVMg
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this first question: Briefly describe the nominated organization: its history and past performance (up to 200 words):
Total 199 words used.
Anonybit began as a research project to adapt the principles of decentralized finance to the world of identity. The problem to solve was how to ensure strong authentication without maintaining central honeypots of personal data. With data protection regulations calling for data minimization and privacy-by-design, it has become imperative to identify new models for protecting, storing and using personal data. Commercialized in 2021, Anonybit leverages multi-party computing and zero knowledge proofs in its decentralized approach, breaking down biometrics and other personal data into anonymized bits and distributing them over a wide peer-to-peer network where they are encrypted, stored, and processed for matching. With Anonybit’s unique approach, there is no need to assemble the components to conduct a biometric match, eliminating the risk of a data breach. The company offers three products: Decentralized identity cloud supporting biometric solution providers to build privacy-preserving 1:1 and 1:N identity solutions;
-
Decentralized authentication for enterprises, leveraging state of the art liveness detection, decentralized biometric matching and storage and integration into orchestration systems;
-
Decentralized data vault for private keys, backup passphrases, crypto assets and more, utilizing the platform's biometric authentication capabilities to ensure that only the authorized user has access to these assets.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this second question: Outline the organization's achievements since the beginning of 2020 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
Total 186 words used.
Since 2020, the company has commercialized its decentralized biometrics infrastructure and launched 3 products that are sold into partner organizations as well as enterprises to bolster their privacy and identity management postures.
In January 2022, the company announced a $3.5 million seed funding round led by Switch Ventures, with participation from Next Gen Venture Partners , Preceptor Capital and other strategic angel investors. The company has also attracted a first-rate advisory board. Anonybit has also established several key partnerships including Aware, to address biometric data security, Abine, powering the first decentralized password manager; FacePhi Biometria to allow its customers to sidestep questions on where to store identity data that is being collected for digital onboarding purposes; and DropVault, where Anonybit provides users strong authentication for their B2B encrypted document sharing vault.
In April 2022, the company introduced one to many identification capabilities to its decentralized biometrics cloud. In an industry-first, Anonybit will support fully decentralized deduplication and lookup functionalities for biometrics which enables significant enhancements from a privacy by design perspective to a wide range of use cases, including government backend systems, watchlist and deduplication functions.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this third question: Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the organization's past performance (up to 250 words):
Total 219 words used.
The accelerated collection and dependency of data, in particular personal identifiable information (PII), is part of our daily business and personal life and digital interactions. With it, the acceleration of PII compromise has also expanded greatly.
The reason for this goes to the heart of how PII is managed and secured. The classic approach to securing sensitive data involves strengthening the security around it - either controlling access to a central database and/or encrypting the information in it, or relying on personal devices as identifiers but clearly neither approach is working.
As a result, the industry has looked for ways to decentralize sensitive data and avoid honeypots of information that can be stolen. Solutions such as blockchain are being stood up to address specific use cases. However, when it comes to the most critical PII, which are a person’s
irreplaceable biometrics attributes, all attempts for decentralization storage and matching have failed, putting us in the endless cycle of hacks, breaches and identity theft that threatens the integrity of our digital interactions.
Anonybit’s breakthrough solves this problem by rendering biometrics and other data unhackable, while still allowing it to be used to verify that someone is who they claim to be. In so doing, we are launching a new category for biometrics privacy, which will restore trust in online communities.
- You have the option to answer this final question: Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 88 words used.
Here are some podcasts and media articles that cover the topic and importance of the work that is being done at Anonybit to create:
-
A world with no data breaches because there is nothing for a hacker to find and nothing to steal
-
A world where we can conduct transactions online safely because the people we do business with know who we are
-
A world in which we can trust the custodians of our data
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202204/anonybit-smashes-the-honeypot-with-first-1n-identification-via-decentralized-cloud
https://anonybit.io/resource/securetalk_podcast
https://anonybit.io/resource/epam-podcast
https://youtu.be/W600bDTYVMg
| Attachments/Videos/Links: |
|---|
|
