Biometric authentication that derives cryptographic signatures from a live heartbeat

Tenbeo, based in Brussels and led by chief executive Athalis Kratouni, works on a biometric signal that behaves differently from the ones already in wide use. A face or a fingerprint can be captured, copied and replayed, and generative models have made synthetic versions of both cheap to produce. A heartbeat's electrical pattern, read as an electrocardiogram, is individually distinctive and exists only while the person is present and alive, which makes it a liveness signal as much as an identity one. Tenbeo applies AI models to that live signal to establish who is at the other end of a request.

Rather than storing a biometric template that could itself be stolen, the system derives a cryptographic key from the heart signal at the moment of authentication and uses it to sign the approval request, with the resulting signature written to a blockchain record. The practical consequence is a proof that a specific living person approved a specific action at a specific time, which is the assurance that matters for high-value transaction approval, sensitive access decisions, and any workflow where an attacker's best available forgery is a convincing deepfake of a face or a voice. The company has also worked on cultural projects exploring machine-age questions of proving humanness, including a collaboration with the artist Krista Kim.