Under the skin: the patent where my thinking began
Long before Anaxee, before the Digital Runners, before any of it, there was a hand under an infrared light and a question I could not let go of. In 2008 we set out to solve a biometrics problem the biggest names in the field had left broken for people like us. What came out of it was a granted US patent. What stayed with me was the way of thinking that got us there.
In the late 2000s, biometrics in India meant fingerprints. And fingerprints failed exactly where we needed them most — the worn fingertips of a labourer, the sweaty or oily hands on a factory floor, the mehndi on a woman’s hands in a village. The technology the world was proud of broke the moment it met real Bharat.
So I asked a different question. Not ‘how do we make fingerprints work better?’ but — what if a person’s identity isn’t on the skin at all, but under it?
Reading what you cannot see
Veins sit below the surface. Under near-infrared light they show up as a dark, branching map — invisible to the eye, and effectively impossible to forge. You cannot lift them off a glass. They do not wash off with sweat or mehndi. We decided to turn that hidden map into an identity.
Two things made it genuinely hard, and solving them is where the real work lived. Lighting a curved hand evenly is brutal — so instead of piling on more lamps, we used a trick of physics and let the camera’s own iris even out the image for us. And the same vein pattern can be read a dozen different ways — so instead of gambling on one reading, we taught the system to hold all of them at once and compare. Clever only in the way that counts: it worked.
What being early taught me
The patent — US 8,803,963 — was granted in 2014. Since then, more than twenty later patents have cited it, including ones from Apple, Samsung, Fujitsu and Thales. I don’t say that to name-drop. I say it because of what it taught me, and what I have carried ever since: if you think from first principles, you can end up years ahead of people with a hundred times your resources. You only have to be willing to start from scratch.
The question never changed
Here is the thread, and it has nothing to do with biometrics. It is a habit. Take a problem everyone finds too hard or too boring, refuse the standard answer, and build from the ground up for the India that actually exists — not the one in the brochure. It is how I approached a vein pattern in 2008. It is how I approach the work I do today. The subject changes. The question under the skin never does.
— Govind