A START-UP that aims to be the ‘Intel of cyber security’ has been valued at up to £180 million in an intellectual property exercise backed by Scottish Enterprise.
Edinburgh-based Payfont, which specialises in technology to prevent identity theft online, was given the valuation by Welsh consultancy Inngot after it valued Payfont’s intellectual property between £45m and £60m.
Payfont, which has raised £3m from private investors since its launch in 2012, said it been granted one major patent in the US and had another three applications underway.
“We believe our product is the best product for securing people’s identities and their data in the world today,” said founder and chief executive David Lanc, a former executive director of Royal Bank of Scotland’s cards business who helped roll out chip and pin technology.
The company’s ‘personalised authentication’ system allows users to choose their own online identity combinations from a range of options that could include pictures, words or biometric tags such as fingerprints or voice. ‘Dynamic cryptography’ is then used to break up personal data into tiny granules that a cyber thief is unable to decipher.
“It’s like grains of sand,” Mr Lanc said. “We break the data up into maybe 20 pieces spread to the cloud, so if someone wants to try and steal it, they can only see bits of it. Even if they did break into one of these cloudlets as we call them, they would have no idea where it came from or who it belonged to.”
Payfont says its system has been independently validated as more than 99 per cent less vulnerable to cyber criminals than any other system currently available. The company said it had spent £2.5m building the system, and was valued at £1m four years ago.
“[The new valuation] puts the company in a proper light in terms of the value of the technology and what it can mean to the global markets that we wish to service,” Mr Lanc added. “Our vision is we want to be the Intel of the security world – the company that sits behind the scenes to help people secure their identity and protect themselves online.”
Mr Lanc said Payfont was seeking to raise another £2.5m from private investors to take its products to market. The company is currently in discussions with organisations including banks and said its system would be ready for testing by potential customers in the third quarter of this year.
The intellectual property audit was conducted under a scheme backed by Scottish Enterprise. Martin Brassell, an expert on intellectual property valuation and chief executive of Swansea-based Inngot, said: “Payfont’s intellectual property is potentially highly disruptive. Its approach to data fragmentation makes a virtue out of the internet’s capacity to distribute data widely, turning a former risk into an opportunity. It also crosses a number of perceived boundaries in the cyber-security marketplace.”
Financial Fraud climbed 26 per cent to £775m in 2015, according to the Financial Fraud Association.
Earlier this year, phone company TalkTalk hit the headlines when hackers stole the details of 150,000 customers to sell online to criminals.
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