let me refresh your memory about ZWIPE, since you seem to mock them repeatedly..
Biometrics industry stocks this week
Jan 25, 2018 | Jeff Sanford
Another story in the fingerprint scanner space this week involves Zwipe, yet another Scandinavian biometric player. Based in Oslo Norway the company is emerging as a key player in the contactless payment card space. Like Vivo, Zwipe was founded in 2009. Although it’s headquartered in Norway it prides itself on a diverse workforce, which includes 11 different nationalities spread across four different time zones. The company won a fintech award for innovation in payments presented in London England in 2016 for its fingerprint activated payment card. The device has a unique energy harvesting technology that gathers the energy it needs from a payment terminal using NFC (near field communication) technology. It was recently announced that the Zwipe tech is being rolled out in the market through a card being offered by Gemalto and the Bank of Cyprus. In the wake of that good news the company has just announced that it has raised an additional USD $1.2 million in funding that will be added to USD $4.3 million raised earlier this year. The funding comes in the form of a private placement of new shares to existing and new investors. The company’s stock is not publicly traded. But the size of the equity capital raise was, according to a press release, “… increased after the extraordinary general meeting held 7 December 2017 to meet demand for shares from existing shareholders.”
As it is, shares of Zwipe are entirely owned by a group of institutional and private investors, as well as employees and board members. According to the press release, after the latest transaction, key employees, including the CEO and founder and board members, hold 37.2% of the outstanding shares. That’s impressive. Clearly the insiders think the company has a fantastic future. The latest equity capital round brings the total raised in equity, debt, and grants since inception to USD $25.6 million..
It’s worth knowing who some of the shareholders are. According to the company’s website Zwipe has key partnership agreements with Japanese firm, Hitachi High-Technologies, and a Chinese firm, Kuang-Chi. One of Zwipe’s board members is Weizi Huang, the COO of KuangChi Science Limited. She is described as co-founder of the firm. Another board member is Dr. Liu Ruopeng, a person described as a “… distinguished scientist and innovator and one of the five founders of Kuang-Chi.” Kuang-Chi is another extremely interesting Chinese company.
