Late last month, SRI Identity, the SRI International branded line of business that specializes in developing biometric identity verification solutions for a wide range of vertical markets, was officially launched as a new independent company under a new brand, Princeton Identity. Princeton Identity is primarily being funded by Samsung Ventures, which has long partnered with SRI International on a variety of biometric projects, along with their former parent company.
Mark Clifton, Princeton Identity’s CEO, says the primary motivation for the company becoming an independent venture was due to their need to focus on product development and having the funds necessary to do so, which would have been more difficult under the SRI umbrella.
“The amount of investment required to do that wasn’t available within the structure of SRI as it is a not-for-profit company with limited ability to invest deeply in some areas,” Clifton explains. “SRI spins out companies and independent ventures on a regular basis. Their typical ventures are small with relatively few employees attached to them. In our case, we spun out the entire business line. The idea was really to get that investment so we could focus on the next generation of products in iris recognition and identity.”
Additionally, Samsung’s investment in the company means that all of the resources of the electronics giant will now be at their disposal.
“We now have access to all of Samsung and it’s a very big company, so the opportunities with them have expanded quite a bit,” Clifton adds. “Previously, we were just focused on their mobile group and that’s going to continue but there will be additional opportunities with some of their other business groups.”
Moving forward as an independent company, Clifton says building brand awareness will be paramount as they seek to educate more end-users about the benefits of their solutions. “We have some unique technologies, including high throughput and high security devices that enable you to move a lot of people quickly through different installations and that also provide an easy to use experience for the end-user,” he says.
Aside from the injection of new capital into the business, Clifton says Princeton will have the added flexibility to design products for a wider array of applications within the biometrics space.
“The real focus going forward will be professional security and access control, as well as some of the larger enterprise markets like airports, border security and government buildings,” he says. “We did come out with some multimodal, walkthrough devices last year and we’re going to continue that. Through our partnership with Samsung, we’re able to reduce the price of a lot of our different technologies. Things that used to be fairly expensive we can now drive the price down on and we can also make products easier to use and more adoptable by the general public.”
Last year, for example, the company released its Identity on the Move (IOM) Access Control Tablet which leveraged a Samsung tablet. With Samsung’s recent release of the Note 7 smartphone, Clifton believes they can bring this type of functionality to the masses in security.
“We see additional opportunities for the market to adopt biometrics for use in everyday life,” Clifton adds. “What happened with fingerprints and Apple – putting fingerprint readers on mobile phones – fingerprints have taken off as a biometric that people are comfortable with and we think the same thing will happen with iris recognition now that Samsung has put it on their phone.”
