Plano-based Illuma Labs, a fintech that provides advanced voice authentication technology to banking contact centers, has raised $9 million in Series A funding led by LiveOak Ventures, with participation from Forefront Venture Partners, Curql Fund, UsNet, Capital Factory, Connexus, and TDECU.

Milind Borkar

The company’s flagship product, Illuma Shield, provides “frictionless” authentication for contact centers by using passive voice biometrics.

Illuma said the Series A will accelerate the development of the company’s solutions—which address threats like fraud, voice cloning, and deep fakes—while expanding its reach to more credit unions and banks nationwide.

“Passive voice authentication is always evolving and is a strong first line of defense against identity fraud in call center settings,” Illuma Founder and CEO Milind Borkar told Dallas Innovates. “It isn’t just for verifying customers. With voice spoofing becoming a new threat targeting internal help desks, we expect companies will begin using voice authentication for internal employees to combat the risk of help desk fraud that has exposed some major corporations to penetration of their IT systems.”

To date, Illuma has raised $12.5 million, according to Borkar, who said his company plans to collaborate “with new and existing investors for ongoing support as we continue to grow.” As to growth, his team has “more than doubled” since 2022 and he expects it to more than double again by the end of 2025. The company has been growing at an over 160% compound annual rate and doubling its client count annually over the past few years, he added. Drivers behind that growth include “high demand for affordable voice biometrics in the banking sector, increases in fraud, and continued support from our investors.”

Heading off dangers of AI-based voice cloning

Artificial intelligence has rocketed to mainstream interest in recent years. That’s been driven to a large degree by fear of what AI might do—and what it might enable criminals to do via the use of AI-based voice cloning.

Borkar said Illuma has has been “actively addressing” the threat of AI-generated deep fakes clones since voice cloning technology first became publicly available.

“Our R&D has resulted in the creation of a proprietary deep fake detection engine that continues to put Illuma Shield at the forefront of fraud prevention and account takeovers,” Borkar told us. 

He said Illuma has a 3-pronged approach to address all types of voice fraud including—but not limited to—deepfakes:

1) A strong authentication engine based on passive voice biometrics to ensure a precise voiceprint match;

2) State of the art deepfake detection engine to recognize subtle signatures of machine generated voices; and

3) Layered multi factor authentication to ensure high risk transactions are protected with minimal friction.

Illuma’s “frictionless” system works in the background, analyzing the unique characteristics of a caller’s voice and device during natural conversation, without requiring security questions or passphrases. The tech significantly reduces call handle times, the company says, with some institutions reporting a reduction in authentication time from 90 seconds to less than 15 seconds per call—all while helping to prevent account takeovers and fraud attempts.

‘Less than 2%’ of credit unions and community banks use voice biometric authentication

In the banking world, there would seem to be an ever-growing need for tech like Illuma’s. According to research by Market Research Future, the banking biometric market will reach $18 billion in 2032, growing at a compounded annual rate of 15.8% between 2022 and 2032.

But Borkar said that as of 2024, “we believe less than 2% of credit unions and community banks in the US have deployed voice biometric authentication technology.”

Illuma’s portfolio has been designed to address the mid-market use case, and Borkar said his company is a “leading provider” in the space. Beyond banking, voice authentication technology also addresses the need for caller authentication in adjacent industries like telco, insurance, healthcare, and government, he noted.

“We’re exploring those opportunities as they come to us,” he said.

Eyeing affordability and ‘passive’ authentication as a competitive edge

Competition in the voice authentication space includes companies like Nuance Gatekeeper, Validsoft, and others. So what’s Illuma leveraging for a competitive edge?

Affordability, Borkar said.

“The key roadblocks to mass adoption of passive voice biometric technology have been high cost and effort to integrate and roll-out the technology in a client’s contact center, paired with the very high cost of ongoing maintenance and usage,” he explained, noting that a rollout of one-year-plus paired with total cost of ownership exceeding $1 million per year “is very common.”

In contrast, he said his company’s Illuma Shield technology is available “at a fraction of the cost,” making it affordable for banks and credit unions of all sizes. The tech can be implemented “in days and operationalized in weeks,” with little effort from internal IT teams, he added.

Unlike active voice biometric systems, which can cause friction during enrollment and are at greater risk of being fooled by deepfake technology, according to Borkar, Illuma’s passive voice authentication “has a frictionless enrollment process that drives high adoption, and is more resistant to AI voice cloning tools.”

Biometrics and privacy

Stepping anywhere near the landscape of deep fakes can be a legal quagmire steeped in privacy issues. To navigate that landscape, Illuma invests in legal research around biometrics and privacy laws in all 50 states. The company provides regular updates to the banking community regarding the latest changes in these regulations, Borkar said.

One Illuma leader helping keep the company on top of things is Co-Founder and CTO Jeremy Whittington, whose career roles have ranged from developer and architect to journalist, advisor, and serial entrepreneur. Under the CTO’s leadership, Illuma said it has successfully converted innovations in voice biometric authentication into “state-of-the-art products that are easy for financial institutions of all sizes to operationalize.”

“My career started in customer service, and that has been a primary driver for the past 20 years,” Whittington said in a statement. “It’s exciting to work on technology that can reduce fraud and improve the customer experience at the same time. A rare achievement.”

Aiming to stay one step ahead of the bad guys—and snagging patents to do it

Illuma has its own in-house R&D team that works continuously to implement AI and machine learning into its passive voice authentication system, while also staying ahead of emerging threats such as deepfake technology.

The company’s core technology has been awarded 6 patents by the USPTO. And with the rise in recent threats due to the growing adoption of generative AI, Illuma Labs has invested additional time and effort into creating a deepfake detection engine that is making the platform “even stronger and more secure,” Borkar said.

“Our solution continues to be highly effective at preventing account takeovers in banking call centers,” he added, despite the rapid growth of AI’s powers and the growing adoption of it by bad actors.

Investors see the potential

Venu Shamapant, founding partner at LiveOak Ventures, which led the Series A round, sees a “clear growth path” for Illuma.

“With Illuma’s position in the fintech sector as a provider that delivers state-of-the-art voice biometrics accessible for financial institutions of all sizes, there’s a clear growth path to becoming the preferred provider of voice authentication and fraud prevention solutions in this space,” Shamapant said in a statement.

Chad Rogers, EVP and COO at investor Connexus, is seeing long-term benefits in having voice authentication in place.

“Too often, adoption of increased security measures results in less convenient, less pleasant member service interactions,” Rogers noted. “That said, our collaborative four-year Illuma partnership and our strong track record with their innovative Illuma Shield voice biometric technology have proven just the opposite. Not only are we doing more to mitigate fraud while ensuring the safety of our members’ data and assets, but we’ve streamlined their member service experience by eliminating traditional, often burdensome, out-of-wallet authentication questions. With Illuma Shield, we’ve shortened individual call times by one minute on average, significantly reducing our operational expenses, and affording our members and employees a much more engaging, efficient, and secure experience.”

The industry and media are noticing, too. In 2024, the Illuma team won an award from CreditUnions.com in the Innovations in Fraud category.  And last May, Borkar was honored by Dallas Innovates, the Dallas Regional Chamber, and Dallas AI in their inaugural AI 75 list in the category of AI Mavericks.

Are you really talking to who you think you are?

It’s not just banks that worry that the person on the phone isn’t who they say they are. A wide array of businesses—and everyday people—have also begun worrying who’s truly behind that next phone call.

As the threat continues to grow, Illuma sees passive voice biometrics as having potential applications across many industries and platforms.

It all comes down to trust—an increasingly scarce commodity in the evolving world we live in.

That’s why passive voice biometrics “could conceivably be deployed through any number of voice channels by businesses and individuals seeking greater confidence that they can trust the identity of the person to whom they’re speaking,” Borkar said.

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