1Kosmos Secures $57M to Advance Biometric Fraud Prevention (BankInfoSecurity)
August 12, 2025
- News
Series B Funding Round to Drive AI Authentication and Multi-Cloud Infrastructure
An identity verification startup led by Simeio’s former CEO raised $57 million to support multi-cloud resilience, AI security models and a specialized federal government practice.
New York-area 1Kosmos said the Series B funding will be used to enhance the firm’s AI-first approach to combating identity fraud, particularly through advanced biometric authentication, behavioral analysis and decentralized identity architecture. Founder and CEO Hemen Vimadalal said the money will be used to build resilient infrastructure to support critical identity verification and authentication services.
“Half of it is going to be going toward go-to-market, product marketing, sales, expanding in newer countries,” Vimadalal told Information Security Media Group. “And the other half is really around research and development. Because we are taking an AI-first approach, most of our products and capabilities are going to be built on AI.”
1Kosmos, founded in 2018, has been led by Vimadalal since January 2021, employs 111 people and raised more than $72 million, including a $15 million Series A round in February 2021 led by Forgepoint Capital. Vimadalal served as CEO of Atlanta-area identity service provider Simeio from December 2009 to August 2020, and remains chairman of the board at Simeio (see: Vendors Align IAM, IGA and PAM for Identity Convergence).
What’s Needed to Authenticate Users Without Passwords
The company’s Series B round was led by Forgepoint and Oquirrh Ventures, with the former bringing deep cybersecurity expertise, CISO connections and experience scaling companies internationally, while the latter offers proven capabilities in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East markets, where 1Kosmos already sees significant revenue growth. The company will open offices in high-growth regions like Saudi Arabia.
“They understand the space of cyber, and they know how to go to market internationally,” Vimadalal said.
1Kosmos uses AI-powered biometrics and contextual analysis to verify users without passwords, which Vimadalal said involves collecting behavioral data, biometric markers and environmental/contextual signals. He said the company has moved from probabilistic models to deterministic verification with cryptographic proof, ensuring that the individual who enrolled is the same one attempting to log in.
“Using biometrics with a lot of AI to identify behavior of a person – how he types, what a face looks like, is it a deepfake, what his contextual patterns are on the internet,” he said. “Traditionally, this used to be done with probabilistic solutions. Now we are doing it in a deterministic way, so we have cryptographic proof that the person who has been on boarded is the same person that’s actually entering your organization.”
While voice authentication has been considered a form of biometric security, Vimadalal points out its vulnerability to AI-driven impersonation attacks, where a recording can be used to mimic a person’s voice. The process combines government-issued identity documents, biometric data and contextual behavioral patterns to create a unique fingerprint for each user that is stored on a decentralized ledger.
“Voice authentication has been compromised,” Vimadalal said. “It is so easy to impersonate that with a two-minute sound bite of you. I can impersonate you on a call. The tools are very simple. So catfishing happens all day long.”
How the Needs of Federal, Commercial Customers Differ
The company is building a multi-cloud architecture capable of seamless failover between providers such as Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure. This automated multi-cloud setup ensures uptime even during large-scale outages. This resiliency is being enhanced through the use of AI agents that continuously monitor infrastructure for anomalies, Vimadalal said.
“Resiliency in that scenario comes from making sure that there is uptime and the multi-cloud setup,” Vimadalal said. “When Google goes down, how do you function on Amazon? If Amazon goes down, how do you function on Azure? And these things happen, right? These things happen in today’s infrastructure. We’ve seen outages that have been at the infrastructure layer.”
In the commercial world, Vimadalal said the emphasis is on user experience and operational efficiency, while in the federal space, fraud reduction is paramount. To meet federal requirements, 1Kosmos is investing in isolated, highly secure infrastructure dedicated to government clients. The firm’s technology is designed to plug directly into federal systems, enabling agencies to verify and authenticate citizens.
“We are delivering a solution that is a plug-and-play for the federal government,” Vimadalal said. “We’re super excited about what we are delivering to these agencies today, and you’re going to see, hopefully, when you’re filing your taxes next year, you’ll be doing this through the 1Kosmos platform.”
1Kosmos’ roadmap is anchored by the concept of an identity score, a numerical representation of an individual’s identity trustworthiness, similar to a credit score. This score would stem from multiple levels of identity proofing, from basic email verification to advanced biometric and wallet-based verification, and could be used by organizations to quickly assess the risk associated with granting access to a person.
“We are here to build an identity scoring system, just like the way your credit score has been built over the years,” Vimadalal said. “No one has worked on an identity score. And so our system today, with the levels of different proofing that are out there, is capable of providing a base score of an identity. We’ll be able to release that to different people to consume it, like they do a credit score.”