Lithuanian cyber security start-up raises €500k from investors

AimBrain, which was founded in Edinburgh by Lithuanian co-founders Andrius Sutas and Alesis Novik, secured funding of £350,000 (€480,000) from Episode1, the venture capital firm behind leading UK companies Zoopla, LoveFilm and BetFair.

“Our vision of the future is that any device you interact with will know that it’s actually you. It will just work. You won’t need to remember any passwords,” Sutas, co-founder and chief executive of AimBrain, told The Telegraph.

The start-up offers security based on behavioural biometrics, meaning that its software tracks and learns how a person interacts with mobile devices, from typing speed to how hard they press or where they swipe.

Based on that it can judge whether users are who they claim to be, blocking access to an unauthorised person who has stolen a password, picked up an unlocked device or hacked into a network. AimBrain’s security also means that people would not have to keep re-entering their passwords to keep their sessions active.

The company is planning on launching security based on facial recognition in 2016 that could almost completely replace passwords.

“I don’t think the password will ever fully go away,” co-founder Alesis Novik told The Telegraph. “But the policies around passwords will definitely change – having to choose 15 random characters will disappear.”

The company said new digital-only banks without branches would be the “perfect customer” for their products, and said that a range of banks were already trialling AimBrain.

Last week, AimBrain won an Acceleration Award from the UBS Future of Finance Challenge, which will give it the opportunity to test its technology at UBS.

The Lithuanian co-founders of AimBrain originally met on a flight to Edinburgh, where they were moving to study at university, and AimBrain was one of the first companies to enter the cyber security accelerator, Cylon, in Hammersmith, London.