DUST Identity, a security tag and identity for things, has collected $10m in its Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins.
The round included support from strategic investors Airbus Ventures and Lockheed Martin Ventures. In addition to these backers, New Science Ventures, Angular Ventures, and Castle Island Ventures also joined the round.
Funds from the round will be used to boost product development and engineering, nurture its global go-to-market strategy and development, and grow its customer base across industries.
The company offers an unclonable and uncompromisable security tracking solution for hardware authentication and asset protection, it claims. Its platform was designed to solve rising difficulties for businesses to ensure the legitimacy of their global value chains.
Its Diamond Unclonable Security Tag uses nanodiamonds to create an unclonable identity layer for objects and once scanned, the provenance and identity of the object can be clearly traced. Alongside the identity, the company offers an end-to-end ledger backed by blockchain which keeps records of all the transactions, improving the trackability of items.
Some of the technology use cases include data centre security, raw material traceability, hardware component integrity and counterfeit luxury good identification.
DUST Identity CEO and co-founder Ophir Gaathon said, “Today’s global value chains are facing new threats and challenges, and key stakeholders are recognizing that DUST Identity is the leading solution to truly protect the integrity of their supply chains.
“There is a lot of stress today on current controls, and in some areas, organizations and their 3PLs are simply missing tools. In our view, the lack of trusted physical identity to parts and products is at the heart of a wide range of issues. We want to empower people with the ability to trust things by having a secure binding between data to the physical objects. Maintaining the integrity of the data is vital, but it is not enough. We need to extend the trust into the products.”
DUST launched from stealth last year and has seen significant growth since, it claims. During this period, it has deployed pilot programs to with leading technology and consumer electronics brands as well as government organisations.
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