L-1 Identity Solutions announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire Bioscrypt in a stock-for-stock transaction equal to $44 million in Canadian dollars ($43.8 million USD).
According to a statement from L-1, the acquisition "reinforces L-1’s strategic vision to expand its market leadership into physical and logical access control. Furthermore, it dramatically increases the company’s presence in complementary commercial markets, including transportation, banking / finance and healthcare."
Robert LaPenta, founder, president and CEO of L-1 Identity solutions founded L-1 in June 2005 as an investment firm to spur biometric industry growth and to assimilate some of the top firms in that field. He had previous experience at L-3, a defense and security technology provider, and told SecurityInfoWatch.com in June 2005 that the industry was nascent, and was comprised of "hundreds of small entrepreneurial companies, typically undercapitalized and undermanaged." Since then, the firm has purchased a number of leading names in biometric technologies, including Viisage, Identix and Advanced Concepts.
Bioscrypt -- which has delivered solutions for fingerprint and facial recognition to the physical door access industry, as well as to the logical/network access market -- has made acquisitions itself, notably with the purchase of A4Vision, which gave the firm market share in facial recognition. The firm's core algorithms have been licensed to a number of other hardware vendors, but the firm also produces hardware biometric units itself.
"With this acquisition, L-1 strengthens its leadership position in protecting and securing personal identities and assets by extending into access control, a market that is expected to grow substantially," said LaPenta when announcing the agreement to purchase Bioscrypt. "In line with our strategy to acquire the best-in-class solutions, Bioscrypt is a leader in advanced physical and logical biometric access control solutions and brings new and unique technological capabilities to our portfolio of identity management solutions, including three-dimensional facial recognition."
The purchase agreement is expected to close in early 2008.
