The company, which had received R$1.5 million earlier this month, added another R$500,000 to the investment received by Cedro Capital and intermediated by Laqus

Source: PEGN

Minds Digital, startup of voice biometrics, announced a complementary round of contribution that totals R$ 2 million in two weeks. The company, which had received R$1.5 million earlier this month, added another R$500,000 to the investment received by Cedro Capital and intermediated by Laqus, a startup that helps connect to the capital markets.

“The investment should be used to improve the technology, which uses the voice to create a unique identity for each individual. “This round with Cedro was very interesting because it allowed the continuity of what we have been planning for the next three years in this product,” says Marcelo Peixoto, president of Minds Digital, in an interview with Estadão.

As an IDTech company, specializing in digital identification, Minds Digital offers a security authentication service for companies. The differential is the way the startup does the process: according to Peixoto, some elements of the voice can generate a personalized mark for each person – which can be used as a biometric object.

“Voice is a very new thing, which is coming on the market now. It is unique, we go very much to the scientific side to certify this. Our algorithm identifies the elements of the voice and our platform generates a spectrogram, like an identity,” explains Peixoto.

In this spectrogram, the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) can categorize about 70 different factors in a human voice to identify the user’s individual pattern. More common characteristics, such as intonation, tone and timbre of the voice are used, but the company also makes use of the extraction of more technical points, such as the wave frequency emitted by each person.this is one of the things that, according to Minds, prevents it from being possible to fraud a voice: after separating the voice elements, the AI crosses the data obtained to identify whether the speech is true. So even if someone imitates a voice or even plays back a recording, the system identifies it as an inauthentic activity.

“We have some security layers within the platform, which we call voice proof of life. They recognize elements that can tell if the identified voice corresponds to the person who owns that data. By sound waves and a range of variations, we can distinguish if it is someone imitating the voice or if the person has the flu, for example,” says Peixoto.

Also, according to the company, the system does not need to store any personal information in the cloud to make the identification. Currently, Minds mainly serves financial institutions.

Letting your voice out’ in the market

Created in 2017, the company recorded a 52% growth in 2021 compared to the previous year and, according to an internal survey, already adds up to R$5 million in fraud avoided by credit card transactions.

With about 45 employees, the company gets paid for every identity verification done by its customers – the more times a customer uses the software, the cheaper the service gets, to encourage the use of AI in security processes.

“During the pandemic, we noticed that data leaks increased. The companies took many Brazilians into a digital world, but without the culture of security. It is necessary to increase attention in this world. We noticed a boom in fraud attempts on our platform,” points out Peixoto.

The contribution, which was a seed round, now opens the doors for Minds to dream about an international operation, and Peixoto believes that, for this, being present in the ecosystem and in contact with investors is essential. We know that there are governance and financial challenges to be a global expansion, and we want investors to be close to us,” states Peixoto.