Headquarter In: Waterford, Ireland
Founded in Year: 2013
Employees Headcount: 11-50
Specialties: Authentication, Security, Password Protection, Identity Theft, privacy, blockchain, KYC/AML, Zero Knowledge Proof, Cryptography, and Digital Assets
Sedicii Innovations was founded in 2013 by Rob Leslie. Sedicii is his seventh start-up company making Rob a fairly prolific entrepreneur. Prior to Sedicii, Rob was co-founder of Kyckr (ASX:KYK) which floated on the Australian Stock Exchange in 2016 and provides real-time access to legally authoritative, global company data. Rob sees Sedicii as a natural progression as its primary function is real-time identification and authentication of people, products and things.
Rob, by profession, is an Electronic Engineer having graduated from Dublin City University, Ireland in the 1980’s, He has been named as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer for his work on the Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) protocol, which is at the heart of company’s service. He has spoken at Davos on cybersecurity, digital identity and other technology issues affecting the world’s economies.
Rob has always believed that technology has a very important part to play in society; however, not at the cost of privacy. With the introduction of GDPR in May 2018 the need increased significantly for anonymised solutions to address the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) challenge. Sedicii’s product set became even more relevant. The rapid onset of Covid-19 heightened the need even more for digital transformation.
In the early years of the company, much work and testing was done on Sedicii’s Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) technology. Sedicii takes a cyber and privacy risk-based real time approach to this complex situation. Sedicii’s products leverage the full spectrum of psychology, knowledge, experience and capability, using identity management, Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), Multi Party Computation (MPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in an advanced high assurance approach that keeps people safe and secure and gives them the benefits that digital services can provide. Additionally, work was done on securing funding from high-worth entrepreneurs and Government based organisations. Since 2017, strides have been made in securing new projects, partners and customers.
To date, Sedicii has won over 20 technology and innovations awards including the BBVA Open Innovation “Fintech for Future” Award. BBVA is the oldest and largest Fintech Innovation Program in the world and has highlighted Sedicii as “the start-up with the greatest potential to transform the financial sector in the next 10 years!” Other accolades include awards from BT, Citi, EIT Digital, EY, H2020 to mention but a few.
The company currently has 15 multi-locational employees in four countries and is headquartered in Waterford, Ireland. The software development team currently reside in Spain and Belgium with Sales and Administration in the U.K. and Ireland.
The Sedicii vision is centred around a new, global standard for identity and KYC, that reduces costs, improves interoperability, reduces crime and ensures privacy. This set of capabilities will facilitate innovations in digital business that haven’t been possible before, due to high costs and high business risk. Rob believes that, for too long, businesses have been hampered by fragmented and unreliable digital identity mechanisms, which place a limit on growth in the global economy and adds to the costs of doing business and that digital relationships need to be based on trust and interoperability. Rob espouses the belief that the solutions must be re-usable, scalable, secure, compliant and affordable. The risk of identity fraud makes many new business innovations unviable. By removing the massive cost overhead of fraud detection and remediation, Sedicii will enable new leaner business models.
Sedicii is applying its patented technology to build an identity exchange where parties that have lots of trusted identity attributes in their databases can help others to confirm individual identity details without exposing, sharing or transmitting any of the information that they hold. The attributes that the organisation holds are transformed using the patented Sedicii process which makes the information unusable to anyone other than another Sedicii process or server.
One of the primary challenges for Sedicii is building trust. Dealing with sensitive personal information particularly since the heightened awareness that GDPR (2019) and Covid-19 (2020) together with scepticism around proving ID without sharing ID has made the company a slow-burn. However, Sedicii firmly believes that identity and the ability to accurately and quickly prove that you are who you say you are, is at the root of every commercial transaction. With Sedicii, this process takes only a second and is invisible to the end user. It will reduce fraud and help businesses to grow, be fully compliant and add to the efficiency and profitability of an organisation.
Rob believes that the company is growing and stable. With his entrepreneurial spirit and track record, no stone will remain unturned to make Sedicii’s product available and successful thus making the digital world a safer place for individuals while eliminating fraud and adding profitability to those providing services and products.