Biometric authentication specialist Veridium Ltd. today said it closed a funding round of $16.5 million led by British entrepreneur and philanthropist, Michael Spencer, who reportedly provided $14.2 million of the total.

The Quincy, Massachusetts-based firm said it will use the funds from the Series B round to accelerate development of its multifactor authentication platform and grow its sales and marketing presence in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The company has 75 employees in offices in the U.S., the U.K., Romania and Benelux.

The size of the investment, which also included Citrix Systems Inc. and financial services executive and investor Michael Powell, is unusual given that the company had no official Series A round. Its total reported funding prior to today was only $150,000, with an undisclosed amount having been provided by the existing management team and board of directors.

Veridium is tackling the authentication problem with a software-only platform that replaces such things as passwords, tokens and swipe cards with multiple biometrics derived from a smartphone. They include face and fingerprint recognition and a unique touchless fingerprint verification system that captures four fingerprints at once using only the standard camera. Biometric security is considered to be superior to passwords, but consumer-grade technology has proven to be vulnerable to manipulation.

The VeridiumID Platform works in tandem with a mobile software development kit to enable organizations to embed biometrics into their own applications. The platform uses visual cryptography to store and transfer biometric data between the mobile device and server and comes with prebuilt connectors to Microsoft Corp.’s Active Directory and Azure; Citrix’s StoreFront, NetScaler, ShareFile and cloud services; and several open standards such as Radius, Saml, OpenID and WSO2.

Despite its modest external funding, Veridium claims to have a global customer base, including several of the world’s largest financial services organizations. The company’s product “is unique in the industry because it provides organizations an enterprise-ready authentication solution to address those problems with the adoption of biometrics – while increasing security and convenience,” Spencer said in a statement.

Spencer will also join Veridium’s board. The NEX Group PLC, of which he is group chief executive officer, is in the process of being acquired by CME Group for $5.5 billion.

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