TECH5 CTO and Co-founder Is PassiveBolt’s New Strategic Advisor

One of the most prominent names in the identity industry has become a Strategic Advisor to PassiveBolt, a startup focused on using decentralized identity technology for access control. What’s more, Rahul Parthe has also become an investor in the company.

Parthe is the co-founder, Chairman, and CTO of TECH5, a well-known biometrics specialist that offers a solutions portfolio including face, fingerprint, and iris recognition technologies. TECH5 recently entered into a multi-party partnership that included PassiveBolt, as well as ZKTeco and PDQ Manufacturing.

The companies agreed to work together on an access control solution that would leverage biometrics and decentralized identity technology, with PDQ and ZKTeco to provide the biometric reader hardware and door locks while PassiveBolt delivers its decentralized identity tech and TECH5 offers up its T5-Cryptograph solution, which can encode fingerprint and face biometrics into printable credentials.

In a statement announcing his new role with PassiveBolt, the startup also noted that Parthe “was the key biometric system architect of UIDAI program”, referring to the government entity behind India’s pioneering biometric national ID system, Aadhaar.

Commenting on Parthe’s advisory role, PassiveBolt CEO Kabir Maiga called it “an exhilarating development,” and emphasized the value of Parthe’s expertise and strategic thinking.

“His profound grasp of biometrics and identity solutions perfectly aligns with our company vision,” Maiga said. “Rahul’s guidance and support will be pivotal in further developing our KeyShare platform and encouraging broad-scale adoption of SSI solutions.”

KeyShare is a mobile app developed by PassiveBolt that is designed to let users store digital access passes for both physical and virtual spaces. For his part, Parthe acknowledged that one of his aims is to “expand the potential of the KeyShare platform beyond physical access control and expedite its acceptance.”

More broadly, Parthe said he is “intrigued by PassiveBolt’s innovative approach on self-sovereign identity and their dedication to privacy and security.”

The announcement of Parthe’s new advisory role comes shortly after TECH5’s unveiling of T5-FaceLink, a new offering that brings TECH5’s biometric technology to the physical ID itself. The solution adds a biometric code to a given document that embeds the biometric data found in the ID’s photo image, allowing the two to be compared against each other for the detection of potential forgeries.

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June 13, 2023 – by Alex Perala