“In the physical world, the bad guys wear masks. Online, the bad guys use fake identities.”
What might sound like a tagline for a big-budget hacker thriller is actually the way CEO and co-founder Mary Haskett describes the premise of her company. BeehiveID, a 2014 graduate from the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Venture Labs accelerator program, specializes in authenticating online identities based on patterns of social media use.
Haskett and her co-founding consort, Alex Kilpatrick, have both worked in identity authentication for the U.S. Department of Defense – Haskett on the business and managerial side, and Kilpatrick on the technological side. Their experience with government-grade software led them to develop the first incarnation of BeehiveID, a solution Haskett described as “biometrics as a service.” However, while the platform was powered by sophisticated technology, it lacked utility.
“We were going to provide fingerprint, face and iris-matching to companies who didn’t want to build this complexity themselves,” Haskett explained. “However, [users] were not interested in a biometric solution – they didn’t have a biometric problem, they had a fraud/friction problem, namely how to prevent fraud without too much customer friction.”
The two shifted their focus, transforming BeehiveID into a means for online businesses to identify fraudulent users using an ostensibly simple method. A user signs into a site via her social media account, and BeehiveID initiates an authentication request. BeehiveID then prompts the user to grant permission to access her information, thereby starting the authentication process (which takes “milliseconds,” according to the website), and, based on her allowance and discovered social media usage, the customer is approved.
While the process sounds simple, the technology isn’t. BeehiveID incorporates multiple means of identification into its screening process using a set of algorithms that detect historical online behavior termed the (trademarked) Social Authentication Engine. The algorithms track general (non-personal) user trends, the individual user’s browsing and purchasing patterns, the user’s location, social network behavior analysis, IP address, and image analysis.
CEO and co-founder Mary Haskett presents at IBM Smart Camp. Source: Facebook
This multifaceted approach, Haskett asserted, will prove a boon to what she feels is an anemic authentication status quo.
“I think the way we do identity online is just fundamentally wrong. My identity online is backed by an email address and it’s just amazingly weak. Plus, there are things about the online world that make fraud and abuse easier...There will always be a place for anonymity but there is also always going to be a place where you need to know that the person you are interacting with online is a real person and is who they claim to be. And it needs to be lightweight – nobody is going to go for a full blown criminal background check before they do a transaction online. BeehiveID can do that.”
Currently, BeehiveID’s employee pool totals four, and the company has found a healthy client base in the dating site world. Over 800 online dating services throughout 22 countries use BeehiveID to verify identities, Haskett said, validating about 500 identities around the world per month. Prior to its TVL graduation, BeehiveID matriculated into Seattle’s Techstars accelerator program, which earned it a small seed round and a consulting project with the U.S. Navy’s Space & Naval Warfare Command.
“It was a great opportunity for us because it’s an identity project and it allowed us stop fundraising for a while. We are still transitioning from scrappy startup to process-driven business. We’ll need to raise an A round later, once we have worked out our processes and know how to onboard customers in a repeatable way,” Haskett said.
Though “slow to hire and very frugal,” BeehiveID recently won the IBM Smart Camp People's Choice Award and has just signed its first paying customers. Starting in early 2015, Haskett expects to authenticate the identities of over one million users per month.
With a cautious optimism, she added, “That’s keeping us hoping right now.”
