VeriFone Holdings has signed an agreement to become the lead investor in a Series B financing of Semtek Corporation, and has doubled its investment in the security technology developer and acquired an option at a future date to purchase the remaining shares in Semtek.
Semtek is the developer of encryption technology that is the core element of VeriFone’s VeriShield Protect end-to-end encryption solution for securing cardholder data. Reportedly, based on the AES standard, Semtek’s technology ensures that the encrypted card data can be used by a typical point-of-sale software system without any modifications or disruption.
Additionally, VeriFone and Semtek have entered into an expanded, worldwide distribution agreement which provides for open-licensing of the Semtek encryption technology to all other point-of-sale hardware vendors.
Patrick Hazel, CEO of Semtek, said: “We are delighted to complete this latest round of funding with VeriFone, Venrock Capital, and RRE Ventures. Our newly expanded relationship with VeriFone will accelerate the worldwide adoption of our technology, which is rapidly becoming the global standard for payment card encryption.”
Semtek has been focused on resolving the security deficiencies of magnetic stripe based payment systems and works for the development of end to end security architectures for merchants and payment processors.
VeriFone provides expertise, solutions and services that add value to the point of sale with merchant-operated, consumer-facing and self-service payment systems for the financial, retail, hospitality, petroleum, government and healthcare vertical markets.
