Silence Laboratories raises $1.7M to further widen its product offerings
Silence Laboratories has closed a $1.7 million round in seed funding, led by pi Ventures. The round also included participation from imToken ventures and prominent angels like Daniel Ari Friedman, Mahin Gupta, CK Vishwakarma, Priyeshu Garg, Ashish Tiwari, and others. The start-up company plans to use this funding to further widen its product offerings towards decentralised security and enrich the technology stack, strengthen its team and scale its go-to-market operations to help enterprises adopt state-of-the art authentication and authorisation techniques.
The founders, Jay Prakash and Andrei Bytes earned their doctorate degrees at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), where the company was incubated. Silence Laboratories (SL) is on a mission to provide business friendly solutions for distributed digital signing and authentication through a unique fusion of multi-party computation (MPC) based cryptographic algorithms with threshold signature schemes (TSS), and intelligent multi-modal signal processing. SL offers a secure technology stack that provides its customers with a layered system of proofs: proof of proximity, co-location, legitimate possession, liveliness via activity, unique identity, and many others.
The security concerns are growing for digital wallets, institutional asset management agencies and online exchanges and have amounted to loss of billions of dollars. Silence Laboratories identified various common key vulnerabilities in digital wallets and exchanges, as well as flaws in management of private keys that put the financial assets at risk.
They also demonstrated how some of the most used authentication solutions, Push-based Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) which are provided to industries by leading Identity and Access Management providers are prone to several attack vectors and can be abused for phishing. To protect businesses from these risks, the team offers their flagship products: Silent Auth (MFA) and Silent Shard (key and access management) that have their roots in multiple patents.
Silence Laboratories’ vision is to enable a secure, developer-centric cryptographic infrastructure that enterprises can rely on to adopt best in class key and access management technology, reduce implementation costs and focus on their core business.
To develop Silent Shard and Silent Auth, SL has been working closely with several leading industry players, in particular in the Web3 ecosystem. The solutions are designed to support varied demands of authentication and authorisation with a very high degree of contextualisation, be it for digital asset custodians with high risks, non-custodial digital wallets, semi-custodial phone based wallets, exchanges with high expectations on usability, mobility providers, sensitive government or medical institutions or cloud service providers.
“Among others, SL’s team integrated Silent Shard with MetaMask’s Snaps which in itself is a great example of how MetaMask has opened the wallet design ecosystem. The Snap based designs will help to enhance wallet security and set benchmarks for MPC based wallets,” said Jay Prakash, CEO and Co-Founder of Silence Laboratories.
“Account takeover due to single point of failure of the private keys and absence of necessary forms of MFAs is on unparallel rise and have been affecting enterprises in both Web2 and Web3 businesses. Hence, we are witnessing a growing push towards the need of distributed authentication protocols and signature schemes to address multiple recent attacks across different wallets and chains. Silence Laboratories is at the forefront of this revolution,” he added.
“Our solutions are targeted against the critical attack vectors prevalent in the industry today,” said Andrei Bytes, CTO and Co-Founder of Silence Laboratories. “In our pursuit to facilitate the smooth adoption of our technology, and promptly react to needs of the businesses, we recently joined premier global alliances such MPC Alliance and Decentralised Identity Foundation.
“Issues with private key management have led to loss of billions of dollars in 2022 alone. The holy trifecta of ironclad security, great user experience and developer-friendliness for Web3 is yet to be cracked and we believe the team at Silence Laboratories is best placed to solve this. Jay and Andrei bring complementary skill sets with PhDs in signal processing and security respectively and their early traction is testament to their innovative solution. We’ve been extremely impressed by the team at Silence Laboratories and are excited to back them in these times of constant hacks,” said Shubham Sandeep, MD pi Ventures.
Silence Laboratories is also working on setting up its Applied Cryptography R&D centre in South Asia, with local and international collaborations in the field. The centre will attract some of the best talents globally to contribute in solving niche problems in usable security and MPC algorithms and form a backbone for upcoming businesses and products. Silence Laboratories is proudly supported by the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) through its Venture, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (VIE) Office and the ARISE programme throughout its commercialisation and funding.