(electronic theme music0 >> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas. It's the Cube. Covering Polycom 18. Brought to you by Polycom. >> Welcome to Nassau, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here at Polycom 18 in beautiful Bahamas, Nassau. Brian Brackeen is here, the CEO of Kairos. Brain, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> We just met this morning. >> Yep. >> I heard you up on the panel. So Kairos, first of all, I love the name. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Where's the name come from? >> It's Greek. >> Yeah, I thought so. >> It means, the most opportune moment. >> Love it. Okay, so you seize the opportune moment to do facial recognition. Everybody knows facial recognition from Facebook, but talk about what you guys bring to the table. >> Yeah and like you said. You seen it from Facebook. The new iPhone has facial recognition. It's really all about identifying who someone is and verifying their identity. We use it for companies. Prior to doing this for ICS stuff, we were an existing business, six years old. Mostly fortune 500, fortune 1,000 companies. We have retailers understand who's in the retail store. Their age, gender, ethnicities, their emotions, their feelings. We also help people like a, even like school bus companies that identifies which kids are getting on the right bus. We help movie studios to understand how you feel about a film. So we've been in this industry some time. We think it's perfect for the block change >> So there's a security angle there as well. >> Absolutely. >> As the fun on Facebook. How's, what's the state of facial recognition technology? I'd love to hear from an expert. I've talked to some people who say, oh, it's nowhere near ready. And I'm like how can it not be ready? I go on Facebook, they tag me in an instance. (laughing) I go, no, don't tag me. Where are we in terms of the quality and ethicacy of facial recognition. >> Yeah, we can find one person in a billion in about one third of a second. And we're about 99.8, 99.9% sure they are who we think they are. So definitely, the future is really now. >> Now you guys, unlike many companies who either done an ICO or raisen security tokens or done utility tokens, you guys are an established company. And then decided, so let's, but before we get into that. Give us the history of the company. You seized the moment and, how you got started and how you got here. >> Sure. My personal background, I'm a, Philadelphia, originally. We were just talking abut being an Eagles fan. >> Hey, congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you so much. Long time coming. >> The Eagles, a deserved win. It hurts me from being from Boston, but. (laughing) >> But we still get along. >> Yeah >> So worked in large corporations for most of my career. >> Comcast, IBM in Phily, took a job at Apple, just after the iPhone launch on through the iPad launch. Steve Job was still there. It was a period of exponential growth. It changed my life. And then I got the shuttle bug, and quit my job there. Which my parents thought I was absolutely crazy. And started Kairos. First in San Francisco and then moved the company to Miami. We realized early on that facial recognition was a right direction that helping companies to do it was a big idea. Essentially the market is anywhere or anyone that works with people. So thought it was a good and growing market. And we got into it deeply in the last three to four years or so. >> So a bit of a change up. I want to ask you GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation is coming, it's here but the fines and penalties go into effect in May of this year. I learned recently that pictures qualify for personally identifiable information. >> Correct. >> Has that been a tailwind for you? Have people come to you and say, hey, we need help because we, we're on the video business or whatever it is and we need help in case somebody needs to identify somebody. Is that a use case. >> Yeah, we think a lot about GDPR, a lot about it. As your viewers may know, that's really a European Union regulation. However, it kind of extends to people who, anybody doing business there. >> Dave: Right. >> Which is everyone in the US. (laughing) So it becomes almost like defacto US law, even though it's not a US law. There's a lot of concern about, because of facial recognition, your picture really becomes your identity. So how do we manage that. We're actually one of the first anonymous facial recognition companies in the world. We sometimes just let you know that it's the same person, but not who that person is. Protecting your animity and your individuality. >> Okay, is that where block change comes in? >> Exactly. >> Okay, let's pivot to that discussion, block change. Talk about the technology that allows me to own my own data, protect my own data, anonymize, how's that work? >> Absolutely. Let's say me and you were in a kind of friendly wager, if it's really a go right, on the super bowl, (laughing) right. And I, you lost the game, so now you owe me 20 ether. So you don't just want to send it to a random address. You want to make sure that, you know, it's really me. Because 20 ether is a decent amount of money these days, right. And so now you're going to use facial recognition transaction today. Only this face can unlock this transaction. Can open this ether and deposit into their wallet. I don't think you don't even know who I am, but just this face. And so I'm standing on the other side. I can say that I will only accept ether from this face. >> Right >> Yeah, it changes everything. >> And then the obvious question people are going to ask you, server address really, but how secured is that? You know, how hackable is that? Can I take a picture of somebody and then, you know, recreate, you know, that image? How do you, you know, forth that? >> Yeah, yeah. A number of ways. Some things like you can take a picture of someone else and say hold it in front of the camera, that kind of thing. We have all kinds of anti fraud detection. So we can detect from the entrance of light, and because we can read emotions, is the person kind of really alive, are they feeling emotions or are they breathing. All kinds of technology we can use to verify someone's identity. >> Great. All right, let's get in the business of tokens. You choice to tokenize your business. Why does it make sense to tokenize your business? >> Yeah, and you know, you see this world, often times will write a white paper and say this is my idea. I appreciate that, but raising 10's and millions of dollars sometimes, and never coming through on that idea, right. In our case, we were an existing business. We've already raised about $80 million in capital, you know, like a Series A, Series B, very traditional way. And we didn't think we could just go off and build a new division in Gibralter or different kind of exotic. I would say that we're in US space and we have US investors in venture capital investors. So we said, let's do this the right way. Let's create a security token. Completely SEC compliant. So let's just do this like another round. To completely tokenize the existing investors and the new investors. So we're all on the same boat. And we've seen great success because of it. >> Okay and so the motivation for them was for investors was equity. Motivation for the existing, preferred investors was liquidity. >> Liquidity. >> Okay, so you basically took those existing, preferred. They protected their ownership and you transferred them over to tokens. >> Transferred them over to tokens, yeah. Essentially, you don't lose any equity, right. But you gain liquidity. You're still in the business. You're long on Kairos, you can stay long on Kairos. If you want to take a little off the table, you can take a little off the table. It really changes overseas finance. >> Dave: And you're doing it to your Chili token as well or no? >> We're doing it to Chili token as well. >> Dave: Okay. >> And with the Chili token, we gave it away for free. Because then we say to the SEC or anyone else, look, we're not trying to profit or get invested from the Chili tokens, that's why it completely free. We're doing a SEC compliant token. >> And talk about the use cases for that utility token. Howe are people utilizing it and what's the value? >> So going back to our friendly bet for the 25 ether, when I click my face for the first time, when I give a scan, that cost one Tyro token. >> Right >> Now after that, to verify it, it's free. But to create your face the first time, it's a Tyro token. >> Let's see, okay, and then you guys charge a monthly subscription for your service, correct? >> For the block change service, no. We just do it, just face san. >> Now right, okay. >> Yeah. >> But through your core business. >> For core business, monthly subscription, reoccurring revenue, absolutely. >> Excellent. I'll give you the last word. Kind of future, where's all this going? We're here at this investors conference. It's the first conference focused on security tokens? >> Yes, right. >> So, and you're a great example of that, of an existing company not a blank sheet of paper. >> Yeah. >> What's your outlook, you know, for the future of this industry, this eco system, this community? >> I'm literally like bubbling with excitement on the future. And it is, as you know, it's way tough for founders who are not base in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, to raise capital. This sort of democratizes that entire process. Now what you'll have is, somebody started in Miami or Portland or Boston, right. And first they would do a round of small investors, local VCs. Get their model together. Get their act right Get some customers. Things start to work for the company. And then there, instead of trying to go Silicon Valley, and beg them to invest, and maybe they won't just because the location. Now, you do ICO at that stage and make the folks in your community richer. They go off and do more things. Make better cities. It's really, really something great. >> Brian Brackeen, thanks very much >> Thank you. >> For coming on the Cube. Really appreciate having you. >> Yup. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is Dave Vellante. You're watching the Cube. (electronic theme music)