São Paulo - A company founded in Campinas (SP) has won a million-dollar tender to provide biometric services to the US Department of Defense. Griaule will supply the system for storing and certifying the biometric data of 55 million citizens in Iraq and 30 million in Afghanistan.
"Both Iraq and Afghanistan have agreements with the United States to supply biometric systems for civil and criminal purposes. And we are going to update this system," explains Renato Burdin, the company's operational manager.
Signed in September, the 75 million dollar contract involved a group of seven companies, six from the United States and one from Brazil. The project has a five-year term and the companies are already working.
"We're going to update the national databases of these countries. The data is for both civil and criminal use, for issuing documents or identifying criminals, for example," says Burdin.
Founded in 2002, Griaule has already served 4,000 clients in 80 countries around the world. Its biggest market is Brazil, followed by Latin American countries, but the company has also worked in places like South Africa, Israel and India. Today, its main focus is on the US market, where it has had a second office since 2016 (the first is in Campinas, São Paulo).
The company develops software to manage biometric recognition data. This means that it acts after the information has been collected. As well as fingerprints, it works with face, iris, palm and latent fingerprint recognition (left at crime scenes). One of the aims of the service is to prevent bank fraud and fraudulent misrepresentation.
"Our focus is on large-scale projects with large amounts of data. Our architecture is designed to work with highly complex projects in critical environments," says Burdin.
In Brazil, it has worked on projects with Caixa Econômica Federal, the Civil Police and the Superior Electoral Court. The company is responsible for managing the TSE's biometric database, which since 2008 has adopted biometrics as a way of identifying voters at the polls and has been registering voters little by little.
"In the TSE project, our responsibility is to guarantee the uniqueness of the data in the database. It's to ensure that a person's biometric data isn't linked to more than one electoral title, for example," explains Burdin.
According to the executive, the biometrics market is expected to grow over the next few years, driven by the spread of the technology. "There's a lot of room for growth. There are markets globally that still don't use the system as much as they could. And there is also the possibility of using this technology in new sectors, such as smartphones," he says. The company does not reveal its expected turnover for 2018. In 2017, it made 16 million reais.
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