PortalGuard Drives ‘Core Business’ of BIO-key in Q3 Update

BIO-key‘s acquisition last year of the PortalGuard Single Sign-On platform continues to pay off in the company’s latest quarterly report, with CEO Michael DePasquale now framing the solution as part of BIO-key’s “core business”.

Revenues for Q3 of 2021 came in at $1.3 million, compared to revenues of about $0.94 million in the same quarter of 2020 – an increase of 38 percent. They were also up sequentially, compared to revenues of about $992,000 in the second quarter of this year.

The increased revenues helped to reduce BIO-key’s operating loss, which came in at $1.0 million in Q3, compared to an operating loss of $1.1 million in the same period of 2020. Its operating loss for the first three quarters of 2021 was $3.0 million, a 22 percent improvement over the operating loss of $3.8 million reported for the first nine months of 2020.

“We are pleased with the progress of our core business in Q3, as we continued to generate increasing demand for our cloud-based PortalGuard identity and access control solution,” said DePasquale.

It’s also worth noting that the company has been investing heavily in R&D. The company’s financial statement cited “increased research, development and engineering costs, reflecting continued investment in new product development,” as a key factor in the year-over-year increase in BIO-key’s operating expenses from $1.8 million in Q3 of 2020 to $2.0 million in the latest quarter.

Commenting on the trend, DePasquale explained, “we continued to invest in new product development and innovation which enabled the launch of several products during the third quarter, including our new MobilePOS Pro, a handheld, biometrically enabled, durable Android Point-of-Sale terminal and MobilePOS Pro, a new and exciting extension of BIO-keys’ technology and solutions.” The company also unveiled a line of biometric security keys at the end of September.

Unfortunately, the company’s projects in Africa are running behind schedule, prompting a change to BIO-key’s outlook. “With the timetable of material revenues from Africa pushed into 2022, we are revising our full-year 2021 revenue guidance to a range of $5.5M to $7M; down from our prior estimated range of $8-12M,” DePasquale explained.

Nevertheless, the chief executive remained upbeat, noting that the midpoint of the range given would represent 120 percent growth over BIO-key’s 2020 revenue, and adding that the company is strongly positioned for growth with respect to its Software-as-a-Service solutions.

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November 16, 2021 – by Alex Perala