Inside the Accelerator: F8th
The Catalyst Cyber Accelerator is the first cybersecurity-focused commercial accelerator in Canada. Headquartered at the Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst at Toronto Metropolitan University, the Accelerator offers technical, strategic advice, mentorship and business resources to cybersecurity businesses that are ready to become national and international competitors.
In February, the Accelerator launched its fourth cohort with seven innovative Canadian cybersecurity businesses. In this series of articles, we’ll be talking to the entrepreneurs behind each business about the Accelerator experience.
F8th provides banks, governments, and corporations a revolutionary behavioural biometry based continuous authentication. Today, there is no reliable way to detect and prevent account or session takeover and insider threats. This is what F8th’s continuous authentication does very well, without using any sensitive information. With a frictionless design and a seamless user-experience, F8th plans to be the next leading technology enabler for e-privacy legislation and rights, establishing itself as the ‘next generation’ of cybersecurity and e-privacy solutions. We talked to the leadership team about how it works.
What is the elevator pitch for F8th?
F8th is developing authentication technologies that are continuous and passive. The Behavioural Biometric Authentication service collects human interaction with a device such as mouse movement and keystrokes and then uses AI to create a user profile match. It is comparable to a fingerprint identification, but it is the least invasive biometry, as no sensitive data is collected.
What gap does F8th fill in the marketplace?
There are three main differentiation aspects our product is covering.
1) We offer continuous authentication; the user is authenticated not only when he or she logs in but throughout the whole session.
2) It is frictionless; the user is not requested to perform any training or extra activities to get authenticated. No extra steps are required to authenticate the user. The solution is easy to embed over any existing platform which makes it device and environment agnostic.
3) It is compliant with latest data privacy regulations; all data we collect to generate the risk score is completely meaningless and does not fall under any PII (personal identifiable information) definitions. No geo-location our device/browser fingerprints are collected.
How is your experience at the Accelerator helping F8th?
Since we are leveraging existing platforms and augmenting the capacity of any identity and access management services, we are not competing but collaborating with all the cybersecurity service providers in the market. The Catalyst Cyber Accelerator is allowing us to further nurture our relationships with cybersecurity experts and the community of professionals. We wish to provide extra capacities to existing solutions and data privacy compliance with our peers.
How has your Accelerator experience been so far?
It’s been very impressive to see the high quality of the mentoring. We have been part of some other programs where we didn’t get that value. Here, we’ve had so much great cybersecurity insight that we could never get from anyone else. This is really a great place for cybersecurity, and without it, we wouldn’t have as much of a cybersecurity focus as a company. It really sparked the evolution of our cybersecurity practice.
What do the next five years look like for F8th?
We plan to further validate the product adoption in the Fintech industry and decide on a growth strategy based on reseller partnerships and self-implementable tools to deploy the continuous authentication service globally. We will also explore many more verticals in the IAM (identity and access management) market and will achieve it by recruiting industry experts in their domain to accelerate our coverage.
