HYPR Corp., the leading provider of enterprise-facing decentralized authentication solutions, announced today that it has received strategic investment from Mastercard and has been named to the latest class of Mastercard Start Path – a global initiative to support innovative companies with the potential to reshape the future of commerce to achieve scale.
Coming on the heels of HYPR’s recently announced Series A funding round of $8 million led by RRE Ventures, Mastercard’s strategic investment further enables HYPR’s decentralized authentication solutions to extend into the millions of users across the Mastercard payments ecosystem.
With 30 billion devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020, ensuring they are secure and properly authorized when used to make a purchase is critical. HYPR’s decentralized authentication solution improves security and reduces the risk of an enterprise data breach by putting consumers’ credentials on the device itself instead of in a central database.
This approach provides consumers with greater security and usability during payments in the digital age. It also has applications for online banking, merchant services, connected cars and other IoT initiatives.
“The importance of secure authentication has never been greater,” said Roman Kadinsky, COO of HYPR. “Working with Mastercard allows us to bring our decentralized authentication systems to more devices and payments across the IoT.”
By ensuring payment credentials are decentralized, Mastercard and HYPR introduce a level of security, privacy, and usability at a scale never before seen in the financial services sector. Institutions leveraging Mastercard are able to further provide customers with a faster, more secure, banking experience. Beginning with mobile payments, the collaboration aims to expand into online banking, merchant services, connected cars and various IoT initiatives.
“People need the peace of mind that their personal information, their money and their identity are secure in the digital age,” said Bob Reany, Executive Vice President of Global Products and Services for Identity Solution at Mastercard. “We are committed to advancing a consumer-centric vision of security grounded in giving people the ability to maintain control of their data. HYPR’s technology is a smart way to keep critical data where it belongs – close to the consumer.”
In addition, HYPR will be working to identify and source potential new customers for Mastercard to help deploy a mobile or online biometric authentication solution.